Au Contraire, Madam
by heavenlyhuntress
Summary: There's a moment. There's always a moment. For me to come back, him to glance once, then look away. Or does he? SasuHina.
1. Lost

**Disclaimer: I _do_ own Naruto. Yah, I'm a teenage girl who spends her time writing fanfics. My name is Masashi Kishimoto.**

**Not.**

**-First of all...I want to thank you. There really isn't much else to say. I love you all.**

**Second. I'm sorry! I really am. I'm really really super duper sorry.**

**Third...uhm, read? By the way, this is sequel to I am Hinata Hyuuga. You don't need to read that, though, because this is a time skip. It doesn't really matter, but you should know that Hinata escaped from Konoha to get away from her troubles. She had fights with Sasuke and Neji. Yay. And now she's an actress at Suna. **

* * *

_From I am Hinata Hyuuga: With ten more minutes before the play actually began, I was dressed in my idyllic spring green dress, my hair slightly curled. My face had makeup covered so the audience could clearly see my expression._

_I stepped to backstage, where the manager was fixing some small things. He caught my gaze and motioned me over._

_He must have short term memory loss. Or he was a sycophant, sucking up to me._

_"Guys" he said urgently, his voice hushed and earnest. "Here's the actress who will be replacing Satski. I'm very lucky to have found her."_

_I gave her a once over; deep black hair, large doe eyes. She was smiling with excitement and had a pair of glasses in one well-manicured hand._

_"Everyone, meet Karin."_

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**Au Contraire, Madam**  
**One: Lost**

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

Karin. As if it weren't bad enough. Karin.

I stared at the other girl numbly. I saw the curve of the nose, the arrogant tilt of the head.

"I'm Karin."

It felt pretty much like hell after that.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

I ran towards the stage in horror. From the curtains I peeked out, my eyes worried and bleak. The audience was already present, sitting in huge groups in the auditorium.

_Shit_.

"I promised I'd forget," I voiced aloud.

"I promised I would never remember _him_ again. _Her._ And her. Karin."

"I've broken it. I've broken my promise."

The manager beckoned for me hurriedly. "Play starts in five minutes!" he hissed once we were both in the wings of the backstage. "Don't look in the audience! They might see you."

I nodded impatiently, grinding my teeth. The manager nodded back in his usual nervous state and rearranged his tie.

Five minutes passed like a blur.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you to...the play "Sunshine Falls Again." In this reproduction of a wonderful play, we included a few characters to spice things up, and I'm sure you'll enjoy our peformance..."

In irritation I stepped on his toe once he was backstage again.

"Oops."

"Good luck, Arisa."

Taking this as a personal insult I swept into the stage in a flurry of a loose green dress, silver hairpins, and a badly polished shoe. Smile. Smile.

"Sunshine is about love and peace," I projected, "and this story is such a story."

The girls in flowered hats flew in carrying bouquets of daisies, the blush on their cheeks as red as their lipstick.

The play lasted for three hours.

Of the same crap.

But the audience loved it.

(That's all that mattered, supposedly.)

With a sigh I tore off my lime-green purple polka dotted hat and threw it onto the couch. It connected with the leather, dropped to the floor, and rolled under, joining dustbunnies.

Crap," I said aloud. The hat had cost three hundred fifty bucks. I rammed my knees against the floor and peered under the sofa.

Nothing.

I swept the area with my arm, dustbunnies clinging resolutely to my dress.

Nothing.

"Arisa..." Oh, how I hated that voice. "Um, what are you doing?"

The manager sat perched on a tall stool. We were both backstage after the play, (after the five solid minutes of clapping) and cleaning up.

"Looking for my hat."

"You lost it again? Crying shame." He sighed. "When you're done, you may leave. We'll see eachother tonight at the party, so no worries."

"Party. Party?"

"Three to seven. Be there or be square."

I hit my head on the back of a chair.

"Look, Mr. Takeshi - "

"Hikaru."

"Hikaru - "

"No, I think Mister Hikaru sounds more formal." He examined the toe of his polished boot.

I sighed. "_Mr_. Hikaru. I'm not going to be there - I'm busy - "

"No excuses," he chimed in. "When I say 'be there or be square' I mean it. So no excuses." He smiled. "Besides, it will be a wonderful party. Excellent people there, Arisa. You could make even more money - "

Disgusting. "No thanks. I'm busy, you see."

"The other actors will expect you there, Miss Voce."

He always said my last name as "Vo-ssse".

"And your fans. You can sign a few autographs, expand your fame."

A sigh. "I'll be there."

He appeared mollified.

_...but not square._

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

Four years passed in a torpedo, a hurricane, a quick slash of time.

Enough for wounds to heal.

Enough to lose an identity and gain another.

Arisa.

Arisa Voce.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

I wore a black dress, black stockings, black makeup, black shoes, black bracelets, black neclace, black earrings, and a single white flower in my (blackish) hair. I peered into the mirror and decided to wipe away the mascara.

I studied the reflection.

If good looks could kill, what am I?

Would I injure? Would I give small scratches? Not kill. Definitely not.

I sighed and put on a baggy overcoat. At the last second I wrenched the white flower out of my hair and dropped it on the dresser.

Ready and adorned in completely black, I was raring to go.

And get it over with.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

The party's designated place was a lush green, grassy area on the outskirts of Konoha. A high, imposing glass building towered above houses, intimidating and fierce.

There were already at least one hundred people who had arrived, including the acotrs and their guests.

I took a seat by the window and resolved to shrink into invisibility. Images scraped at my eyes once I closed them.

_The dark-haired boy, a,ways watching, always frowning. Can't I make him smile? Laugh? He frowns again. When I reach him, though, he is gone._

My eyes flew open as a bungling waitress crashed into my table. Spoons, knives, forks, and dishes slopped all over my dress. The dishes had custard in them.

"I'm sorry!" she howled, seizing a napkin. "I'm sorry!" Her face was ringed with custard as well. People stared to see what the commotion was all about.

"It's fine."

Perfect. An excuse. To go home, early.

"No - no, Madam. I'm terribly sorry! It's - "

"It's fine."

" - Madam - allow me - "

"It's fine," I repeated. "Don't mind me."

"What should I do" she wailed. "Is custard bleached off Or ironed off? Cold water? Or warm?"

"That depends on the fabric," I muttered, gripping the edge of teh table to stand up. My face was moist with custard. Bits of crust littered the dress.

"I - Madam, I'll wash it for you! the bathroom - here - "

Presently she tripped over a spork. It flipped over, flinging custard at me.

"No! I'm sorry - "

I shook her off. "Really. I'm fine."

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

After cleaning the dress to the best of my abilities with the waitress hovering nervously over me, I threw the paper towel into the trashcan and wiped my hands. "I'm going."

"I'm sorry," she echoed miserably.

"I told you. I'm okay."

She nodded. She couldn't have waitressed for long. "Um, are you an actress?"

"Yes."

"Do you know Karin?" she inquired excitedly, now the polar opposite of what she was moments before. "Karin?! She's my aunt! She's a excellent actress!!"

I smiled bleakly. "I'm sure."

"You should come meet her!"

"No. It's fine."

"Please? You guys probably already know eachother. Besides, you looked lonely sitting there all alone. Maybe you could be friends."

"..." _Not possible. Never. Ever. _To avoid further nagging I accepted. _I'll just say hi. Then once this waitress is outta the way I'll return to my old seat._

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

She lead the way to Karin. Karin was dressed completely in white. Black. White. My polar opposite.

Few people can pull off a white dress with lace, bows, and bunches of sashes.

She did.

"Karin!" The waitress grinned, waving. To my surprise Karin glanced at us and smiled broadly.

"Hey, Hira! Arisa."

"She's Arisa?" came the enthusiastic reply.

I nodded. Just when a sharp headache exploded in my head.

"Well, I'll leave you guys," offered Hira. She gave me another apologetic smile. "Sorry about the custard." She left.

Karin was fiddling with her nails. They were delicate, sharp, and pure white.

I spoke up. "Your niece wanted to introduce you, I suppose."

"Yeah." She turned away from me from a split-second, her curls bouncing. "Hey, get over here!"

There was an tall tanned man right in front of me. I couldn't see who she was calling to.

Karin faced me again. "Uhm, I brought a guest. Since we're all here, why don't you guys introduce yourselves to eahother?" She sipped her champagne, leaving red lipstick on the glass.

"Meet Sasuke. Sasuke Uchiha."

The name seemed distinctly familiar, buried under a web of lies, conversations, and acting. How long ago? I wondered. It seemed I couldn't even remember a few years back. The last memory was traveling to Suna on an airplane.

I gripped his hand in a handshake. His fingers were smooth and brief.

He looked down at me. I avoided his gaze and focused on his shoes. Formal. Very formal.

"Nice to meet you, Ms. Voce."

"Likewise, Mr...Uchiha. Call me Arisa."

"Sasuke to you," he answered with a rather absent-minded air.

I nodded, looking up -

I

_could_

_not_

_speak_

Sasuke Uchiha was a tall man with black, night-sky eyes and a displeasured countenance. A firmly set jaw. Frowning mouth. At my gaze his mouth curved slightly. I could tell it was forced. I forced a smile every day.

_I am young. Inexperienced. How can I forget the day he unearthed my disguise as Neji? Neji?! No - _

"Arisa?"

Karin's face was worried.

"I'm okay," I responded automatically.

_I need to get out of here. Now._

"I have an appointment," I rushed. Now this was familiar territory. Lies. Acting.

They were lost from view as I made my way through the huge crowd. Once outside, I inhaled a breath of cool air.

_I can't believe this. i went too far. How could I let the dumb manager persuade me to the party? What have I done?_

_-It's over now. I'm going back to Suna. _

But his eyes...damn! So hard. Hard to forget.

I twisted the key to the ignition and backed up.

"I'm not falling for that," I said aloud.

Three hours later, it was official.

Lost! I was lost.

I slammed the car door. What good were expensive cars when there was no GPS? Mainly my fault - I had been too lazy, but -

The road was dark; there were two tiny pinpricks of street lights in the distance. No cars. No one.

I jammed my fists into the overcoat. I was never good in emergencies.

"Crap." Massive understatement.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

I didn't carry around a cell phone; if I did I would have a hard time blocking the manager from reminding me every two seconds. So I never used one anymore. My laptop, something I always carried with me, had a map and GPS installed.

I returned to the car, shivering, and lay the laptop in my lap. (A/N: No duh.)

A pop up message flashed before me eyes. Scowling, I puched the X button. It disappeared. Another one came up. Then another one.

_Damn!_

The whole screen was filled now.

I forced myself to exhale. The time read eleven thirty. Then a pop up covered that, too. And another overlapped that pop up.

Breeding faster and more evil than bunnies.

I dragged my mouse to the shut down button. _This program is infected with a virus. Please debug first._

I cursed. And then - maybe the pop ups - maybe if I clicked one, they all would go away.

I clicked. another page emerged from whatever evil depth the virus was from.

**IM TODAY**! it read. **CHAT WITH BUDDIES IN KONOHA! FREE!! FREE!! FREE!! YOU BET YOUR PRETTY LITTLE FACE IT'S FREE!**

"Shut up," I growled in frustration. I was about to click the X button when a message flashed up.

**UKnockOffMySox**: Hi! Ur our official first visitor!

I needed to sign in. I did so.

**AV**: What is this?

**UKnockOffMySox**: It's a website me 'n my friends made. Basically it's a chat rm. How is it??

**AV**: It gave me a million pop ups.

**UKnockOffMySox**: oop!! Sry. I'll have RGreen fix it up.

**AV**: Could you help me with something?

**UKnockOffMySox**: Sure! I've gotta get RGreen first, tho.

I was getting impatient.

**UKnockOffMySox**: Hi again.

**RGreen**: hi!

**AV**: Hi.

**RGreen**: don't mind N-

**RGreen**: I mean, UKnockOffMySox. haha.

**RGreen**: What problem did you have? are you from Konoha?

**AV**: No. From Suna. I'm lost. And I can't go on a map finding website because of your pop ups.

**RGreen**: Sorry sorry! It's not my fault. lol.

**AV**: That's okay.

**RGreen**: so um, where are you?

**AV**: I think -

I squinted at the street sign. "Hokage Road."

**AV**: I think it's Hokage Road.

**RGreen**: Oh! You're pretty close to us! lol. Well, Hokage Road is a huge main road in the middle of Konoha. so, um, could you be more specific?

**AV**: There's a large building with a fence across the street.

**RGreen**: more?

**AV**: Next to it is a big lot. After that is another small street that goes into a cul-de-sac.

**RGreen**: hm. are there any houses on that street? could you tell me what it's called?

I got out of the car and jogged up to the fencepost. In the darkness I could only make out the first few letters. The rest was swathed in a hazy black blue of the shadows the lamps casted.

**AV**: It says Sha. Then I couldn't see the rest.

**RGreen**: Oh! i got it. you're at the intersection at the Hokage Road and Sharingan Street. The building you're looking at is the Konoha Boarding School.

**RGreen**: I graduated from there! good times!

**UKnockOffMySox**: Hey! So did I!

**RGreen**: Shut up, baka. :) So, AV, where are you headed?

I swallowed. Very slowly I shut the laptop and stowed it beside me.

The laptop pinged, signalling a new message. I pushed the keys back into the ignition and drove.

I did not know where. Anywhere but here.

* * *

**I hope it's good for a first chapter. I have many chapters trapped in my notebook - updates should be really fast!!**

**Please review!**

**By the way, if you're interested in BetaReading, please tell me.**


	2. Too Many Pings

**Hi! Thanks to**

**kawaiiitahina123, NewRageInc., deadheart55, Random Person, PoeticFrenzy, CurveCrush, HisaAngel, winterkaguya, Spirit of the Chihuahua, chocoGONEsushi, biawutnow, rcr, vanessa1822, KibaIsHOTT, SapphireSnow, Kawaii Kabu, lizzielol, Lady Goddess 93, iAmAnDaLwAySwIlLbE, NaruHinaforever, Gaara'slittlegirl, girl-of-anime!**

**And here's:**

**

* * *

**

_I swallowed. Very slowly I shut the laptop and stowed it beside me._

_The laptop pinged, signalling a new message. I pushed the keys back into the ignition and drove._

_I did not know where. Anywhere but here._

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**Au Contraire, Madam**  
**Two: There Are Too Many Pings**

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

Two hours later my car was nearly out of gas, I had no idea where I was headed, and I was lost completely in the middle of nowhere.

"Fuck."

I massaged my temples and killed the engine, tossing my keys into the passenger seat. "Crap, crap, crap." I ran my fingers through my now un-smooth hair.

_I can't go on like this much longer. I'm tired. Hungry. Filthy._

No one was up at a time like this. Shops were closed. It was probably two in the morning, the sky still black and deathly opaque.

I eyed the laptop warily. Last hope. Sighing, I flipped open the top.

**AV**: Anyone there. Anyone. Anyone?!

It seemed like forever until another message appeared. I scanned it eagerly.

**ChouTime**: Yawn. I'm here. Hi! You're own 100th visitor.

**AV**: Ah. I'm lost. Do you manage the website or something?

**ChouTime**: Yep, I manage the website. With six other friends.

**ChouTime**: Why are you out so late anyway? Or early.

**AV**: Why are you?

**ChouTime**: I ate too much last night. Barbecue ribs and chocolate. Who knew chocolate had caffeine? Seriously.

**AV**: I'm lost.

**ChouTime**: I'm not good at geography. Sorry. I can get someone, I suppose. Someone smarter. Lol.

**AV**: Please do.

**ChouTime**: I'll hafta IM him. By the way, us website managers are called the Seven Musketeers! Isn't that cool? It symbolizes a chocolate bar I think. A yummy one at that.

**AV**: Okay.

I waited. Promptly after a few minutes, another message showed up.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: sup.

**AV**: Hi. I...am...lost.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: describe loc.

**AV**: Huh?

**Pineapples'nStuf**: location.

**AV**: Wide deserted road in the middle of freaking nowhere.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: can't help u there.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: listen, your best bet is to wait until it's brighter. that way, you won't get even more lost. troublesome, but you'll have to wait.

**AV**: -sighs-

**Pineapples'nStuf**: gps?

**AV**: No.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: our website must've

**AV**: Made a million pop ups, yeah.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: ah. i've fixed it already.

**AV**: Seriously?

**Pineapples'nStuf**: yea.

**AV**: Oh.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: bye. if u need more help give me the mes.

**AV**: Mes?

**Pineapples'nStuf**: Message. too lazy to type. and tired.

**Pineapples'nStuf**: well, bye. by the way, you're the 101th visitor.

**AV**: Lol. Bye.

I exited from the chat room and deleted all the pop ups, inwardly relishing killing them. To my relief no more came up.

The clock now read 2:49.

GPS...map...

I studied the map for a long time. I was in the smack dab middle of Konoha. The nearest gas station was five miles away and a hotel was seven miles away.

I'd have to go to the gas station first. I started the car and steered east to the gas station. Before returning to Suna I needed to rest. Eat. Sleep.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

Thirty minutes, several gallons of gasoline, and a splitting migraine later, I arrived at a vanilla colored building and parked the car. The laptop came with me as I checked in.

"Arisa Voce??" exclaimed the receptionist. Her hair was orange and tied in two huge, high ponytails.

"Just get me a room, please."

Excitedly she lead the way to an upstairs lounge. She opened the door and I entered.

"I can't believe it! No one famous ever comes in!" she sighed. "I can't wait to call me friends! OMG OMG OMG!"

I was asleep before I hit the pillow.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

Twelve thirty the next day I woke to the sounds of pings.

_Ping! Ping!_

I groaned and turned over, rubbing my eyes.

-And flip, my elbow connected with the floor. The side of my face smashed into a chair leg. I fell from the bed in a bundle of thick blankets.

"If only they could see the great Arisa Voce now," I remarked, fighting to keep a calm disposition. My arm was pinned at my side. It burned.

_Ping! Ping! Ping!_

I uttered a low curse before stumbling up to the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face.

Yesterday's makeup was still on; I looked terrible.

"Ugh." I wiped my face wih a fluffy white towel.

_Ping! Ping!_

Having not removed the clothes from yesterday, I felt tired and filthy. I took a quick hot shower and strode over to the laptop.

**Hi, AV! You have one hundred and thirty six offline messages.**

The first one read: OMG! are u seriously Arisa voce? OMG squeal!! reply! please!

I resolved to kill the receptionist.

Amidst the famail I received one from UKnockMySoxOff and the other people I'd IMed.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**UKnockMySoxOff**: Hey! Arisa?! ur famous! lol. I heard from Moegi that ur staying at the hotel she works at! That's so kool! It's a small world after all. haha.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**RGreen**: hey! i heard your work w/Karin! i didn't get to see you yesterday at your performance, though. who knew it was you who got lost?! just in case you're not Arisa, sorry!

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**Pineapples'nStuf**: you probably have a few hundred messages by now, (and yea, I know it's troublesome), but i think it's ironic a famous actress such as you has a laptop that doesn't have a virus scan. just ironic, is all. bye.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**Wish**-**Wish**: I can't believe it! You really ARE Arisa? SERIOUSLY? Oh, hi, didn't introduce myself. I'm part of the Seven Musketeers (stupid name, I know). We're a group of friends who going to be seniors (in college) - except one, he's a few years older - in fall. Right now we all work as camp counselors! SAD, I know :)

It would be nice if we could chat sometime! Not because you ARE an actress, but RGreen says you're nice. She doesn't say that often.

Here's the links to their profiles! Feel welcome to chat with any of us. (You WERE our first guest, after all. Lol.)

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): UKnockMySoxOff  
(Staff):  
BlackLine  
Pineapples'nStuf  
Collateral  
Wish-Wish  
RGreen  
ChouTime

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): **UKnockMySoxOff**  
(Staff):  
BlackLine  
Pineapples'nStuf  
Collateral  
Wish-Wish  
RGreen  
ChouTime

**UKnockOffMySox**

Age: Um, almost there! Almost a senior! I can't wait to get that one more yr over with! But I want summer to last long, too!! aaahh, connundrum.

Note from RGreen: -but he has the brain of a kindergartener. plus, you know, it's spelled coNundrum.

UKnockOffMySox: HEY! And this is from the girl who never capitalizes the first word of each sentence.

Hobbies: Eating, sleeping.

Job: During the school year I was an assistant in a bookshop called Icha Icha. Hey you should know it, it's rele popular. Gag me!

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): UKnockMySoxOff  
(Staff):  
**BlackLine  
**Pineapples'nStuf  
Collateral  
Wish-Wish  
RGreen  
ChouTime

**BlackLine**

Age: 19

Hobbies: I have none.

Job: During the school year I help at a bank. Now I'm a counselor at this stupid camp. Stupid friends and persuasion.

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): UKnockMySoxOff  
(Staff):  
BlackLine  
**Pineapples'nStuf**  
Collateral  
Wish-Wish  
RGreen  
ChouTime

**Pineapples'Stuf**

Age: 19

Hobbies: cloud-watching. sleeping. i eat and drink just because i must. otherwise i doze off.

Job: counselor. pointless.

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): UKnockMySoxOff  
(Staff):  
BlackLine  
Pineapples'nStuf  
**Collateral**  
Wish-Wish  
RGreen  
ChouTime

**Collateral**

Age: I'm 21. Almost 22.

Hobbies: Between running around with kids to teach them how to rope climb or something, and between the exhausting shifts as a camp counselor, I have minimal time to even consider hobbies.

Job: As of now, I'm stuck as camp counselor. Whose idea was this, anyway?

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): UKnockMySoxOff  
(Staff):  
BlackLine  
Pineapples'nStuf  
Collateral  
**Wish-Wish**  
RGreen  
ChouTime

**Wish-Wish**

Hey all! I'm one of the two GIRLS here! YAY FOR THE XX chromosome!! Yahoo!

Age: Um, 18. Nineteen soon!

Hobbies: I love reading, tennis, skiing, drawing, pine-cone-hunting (with all the kids! YAY!), rope-climbing! it's fun! - IMing, being cheerful! I'm officially couples with Collateral. There must be more love in the world!!

Job: CAMP COUNSELOR! WOO HOO!! I HEREBY DECLARE I WILL LOOK AFTER/CLEAN UP FOR/BE A GOOD EXAMPLE for all the kids! AW they're so cyute.

(except when they're trying to mess up my hair.)

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): UKnockMySoxOff  
(Staff):  
BlackLine  
Pineapples'nStuf  
Collateral  
Wish-Wish  
**RGreen**  
ChouTime

**RGreen**

Oh, hi. Stumbled across my prof!

Age: 19, teenage girl, blah blah blah.

Hobbies: i'm realy bored right now. camp counselor SUCKS! (I hate!! I hate!)

Job: uh, camp counselor? i want be a kid-torture-device manager when I grow up. smiles threateningly. the kids are almost as bad as UKnockOffMYSox when he was twelve. god, he was annoying!

Profiles  
Seven Musketeers  
(Manager): UKnockMySoxOff  
(Staff):  
BlackLine  
Pineapples'nStuf  
Collateral  
Wish-Wish  
RGreen  
**ChouTime**

HELLO!! Awesomeness! So, uh, is this like a profile? Where everyone can read or something? What? Oh, whatever. Hi.

Age: 19.

Hobbies: Um, eating. Eating. Eating. Food is wonderful!

Job: I'm a camp counselor. It's good, except for the food. (too nutritious). And the fact that I have to run around with kids chasing me playing tag.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

-To: ArisaV; Arisa Voce-

-From: TakamiH; Hikaru Takami-

Where the hell are you? Are you still in Konoha, even Get your butt over here. We're taking the bus back to Suna at 11:00 AM.

Hikaru Takeshi

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

-From: ArisaV; Arisa Voce-

-To: TakamiH; Hikaru Takami-

Don't wait for me. I got lost. Long story. I am now more than 100 miles away. Once again, don't ask.

Will arrive at Suna who knows when. I'm sorry.

Arisa Voce

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

I gunned the engine and started on the road. Several hours alter I drove through Konoha's borders and back into suna. Never Konoha again. Not now. Not ever. At a rest stop the laptop _pinged_ again.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**UKnockMySoxOff**: Wah! Rumor has it ur gone! Meh, wanted an autograph.

**AV**: Sry.

**UKnockOffMySox**: That's ok! I'm IMing u anyway! lol. Uh, are you coming back to our hick town? It was so boring before you came!!

**AV**: No. I'm not. Gotta go. Bye.

_AV has signed off._

_Three months later,_ Hikaru stopped my acting.

"No soul!" he yelled. "Your eyes are dull, your smile is forced! your movements are so choppy! Smooth! You must be smooth, go with the flow!"

Inwardly I thought, he's so right. I dislike acting. I hate this. I suck.

My expression stayed stiff as he continued to berate me. "Arm movement should be like a rippling thunderstorm! Rippling thunderstorm!" he roared. "You must be happy!!"

You must be happy, he says, and his expression is livid.

I dropped my hat tiredly.

You know what?" I said, "I don't feel like acting today - "

"The performance is in a month!" he interrupted heatedly. The wrinkles around his eyes stood out.

A month. Big, fat deal.

"I know." I mustered a voice that was cool and did not give in to anger. "But today I'm just...out of it."

Hikaru closed his eyes for a second. I felt a flash of guilt. True; he was extremely picky and felt like a pain in the neck at times, but he was my manager. He coordinated the whole play. That needed talent and work.

"Look," he offered wearily," tell you what. I'll let you work with a member of the stage crew for today. Okay?"

"Stage crew?"

"So you can learn how the lights work and all that. And timing. It'll help you with those aspects."

"Fine," I agreed.

He dropped his hands and looked at me squarely in the eyes. "You're a good kid. You need a day off." I sat down on the chair as he strode off, mopping his brow (to yell at someone else).

Presently I heard someone walk in.

He was in his early thirties, or late twenties, dressed immaculately, yet casually, in a black T-shirt and jeans.

He smiled, his eyes crinkling, in his mouth a cigarette.

"Well, salutations, Arisa Voce. Or, should I say, Hinata Hyuuga?"

* * *

**GUESS!! Guess who he is! And all the members of the profiles! (If you do, you win a kookie. And not the Internet kind either. Sort of.)**

**Did you see the new formatting page-thing on FFnet that they just updated? It's so cool!! Yay!**

**Please review - next chapter: Can Hinata be convinced to go back to Konoha?**


	3. Second Chance

**Wow! So many people thought it was Shikamaru, or Asuma, or even Neji!! (Have you forgotten so fast about my OC, KARU?? Cigarette-addicted dude?)**

**It's really late (yawns) I should really be going to bed now...**

**Well, thanks for reviews - anything that I missed, feel free to write me!**

_He was in his early thirties, or late twenties, dressed immaculately, yet casually, in a black T-shirt and jeans._

_He smiled, his eyes crinkling, in his mouth a cigarette._

_"Well, salutations, Arisa Voce. Or, should I say, Hinata Hyuuga?"_

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**Au Contraire, Madam  
Three: Second Chance**

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

I frowned, my heart pulsating.

"I don't know what you're talking."

He took a seat opposite from me, his eyes rather merry. "You know exactly what I'm talking about."

My fingers gripped the edge of the seat, feeling the frail wood bending. "I don't even know you," I accused weakly. But it was not true; his brown eyes were all too familiar, his bad habit of cigarettes.

He sighed, puffs of smoke lingering in the air. I wondered how many he smoked a day. "So long, has it been? What? Three years? Four? You're eighteen, nineteen, already? I remember when you were fifteen."

When I made no reply his face grew skeptical. "Hinata, Hinata, Hinata. Don't tell me you've forgotten your old manager?"

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

I smiled tensely. "I have." Truth. I was ready to crumble with shock. This, along with the fourteen hours of acting practice I had every day this week, with a bad addiction to coffee, made my head swim.

He paused, then shot at me, "What's your name?"

"Arisa Voce."

As soon as the words left me lips he fired again, "What's my name?"

"Karu."

"How old am I?"

"Thirty five," I hazarded a guess."

"Wrong, wrong, wrong!" I watched in strange fascination as he flung the cigarette into the air. It landed on his shoe. Stamping on it, he shouted, "Your name is Hinata! What a strange person you've become! I'm thirty - and my name - wait; it _is_ Karu."

What a strange person I've become, and he's the one who's in danger of catching on fire.

I sat up, feeling stiff under his stern gaze. "If you're not going to practice the lights and timing - "

"Don't you remember?"

"I remember. Distantly. What a stranger person _you've_ become, _Karu_."

He kicked the cigarette, looking rueful. "That's true," he admitted. "But I would never have imagined I would run into you."

I swallowed. "And now that you have, you can just leave."

Despite everything I felt old emotions arise. _Don't leave, Karu. Please don't. You're like a father to me._

"Leave?" His eyes were mournful. "I have no intention of doing so."

"..."

"Truth is, Hinata, I miss the old you." He stared at the door, his mouth trembling.

There was a lump in my throat the size of a boulder. _Don't call me Hinata. _

"You've grown up so fast. Don't you see? Acting is one thing, but being obsessed with it; running away to avoid your troubles - like a coward - being someone _completely_different - Hinata - "

I slammed my foot onto the floor, wincing inwardly. "Don't call me that." Genuine anger seemed to erupt from my insides, clawing at my ribs and seeking a way out -

He snapped, "I'll call you Hinata. That's who you are. What your mother named you. You _are _Hinata!"

I sized him up coldly, making my face emotionless. His was filled with rage.

We both said not a word.

_Don't bring me back to Konoha, Karu. Don't. Out of all the people in my life I've known you for the longest. You're family. WAS family. WAS. If someone can being me back, it would be...you._

But don't...please...

"Leave," I muttered. "Just leave."

He stood up. "Oh, I'll leave," he said.

I glared at the floor, determined not to cry. I hadn't cried for at least a year.

"Either I leave, or you go back to Konoha."

"Leave," I chose immediately. I did not look up. "Leave me be. I was doing so much better without you."

An instant look of hurt crossed his features; I felt immensely guilty. To my horror, tears began to slip down my cheeks.

"Oh, Hinata," he sighed. "You really are still that fifteen year old underneath." Walking over to me he held out his hands.

I hugged him tightly, impulsively, my nose and eyes streaming. "Don't leave," I said, my voice sounding distant and broken "Don't..."

"Aw, you made me cry."

He held me at arm's length. His hand clasped me over the shoulder.

"Hinata, it's going to be alright. If you come back, everything will work out. It's going to be alright."

He took a seat on the other chair, and I chose the opposite.

"Hinata, my secret mission is to now get you back."

"Karu...I'm not going back."

He smiled grimly and gazed up at the ceiling. "When I applied here for a job as stage crew a few weeks ago, I admit I was hoping to ...coincidentally run into you.

But I never imagined you were Arisa Voce. Rising Star."

I winced and glared at a cuticle. "How did you know I was - " It hurt so much to say, a thorn in my already bleeding heart - "H-hinata H-hyuuga?"

"Eye color. And your ears. Mostly ears."

"Eye color?" I repeated faintly.

"It's not everyday I get to see a pale-lavender hue as yours."

"Damn!" I leaned forward, kicking a high-heeled shoe to the table. "Then - " _at the party - Sasuke - and Karin - _

"Nah, I don't think that would determine you're _definitely _Hinata," he cut in. "Many people have pale eyes, pale green, pale blue. And more peopel are choosing pale lavender as contacts, you know. You have lots of fans."

I sat back and listened.

"It was your ears that got me suspicious. You have the tiniest ears. I remember when you were eight - "

"Ah, never mind."

He frowned and took a breath. "Hinata, drop your act. Please. It's hurting you."

"No. ever."

His mouth locked slightly into a snarl. Then he sat back, forcing calmness. I did not move.

"Perhaps it would help convince you if I told you how Neji is doing."

I flinched.

"Hinata, you can't run away from your troubles forever. You must turn around and face the truth." My nails dug into the palm of my hand. "It's no use in pretending. You can't act forever."

"Shut - don't - "

I stopped, tears in my eyes. I couldn't do this. Casting my eyes once more to the ground, I swallowed my words and regained my cool composure.

"Now tell me. Aren't you curious about Neji and Hanabi? After, what, four years?" He clasped his hands together, looking earnestly at me. "Don't you care about them? Or have you forgotten?"

Unclenching my teeth I brushed back my sweaty hair.

"Tell me."

Karu's eyes were far off.

"Tell me."

He sighed and opened his mouth. "He quit basketball."

My throat seemed to have icicles embedded into it. I couldn't seem to do anything but wait, hung on to his every word, for him to continue.

"They were at the championships. He quit just the day before - said he cursed at something, threw something, injured another player. The coach yelled at him on the spot, one of the most degrading and embarrassing things that could happen on a basketball team. After that he said he'd quit. Big fuss. Promising young man, one incident, he quit."

I waited numbly for him to keep speaking. If he did not I feared I would drown in my own shame.

"He started drinking. He couldn't quite let go of your shadow. Said it was his fault."

"A promising young man. No more. No more."

I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting the headache to leak away. "It's my fault." I was surprised anything coherent got out. "It's my fault. I shouldn't have don't that - said that - existed, really."

"No, Hinata. He's all right now."

I wiped my face with a silk sleeve.

"Do you think no one else cares for him?

I looked up. _Maybe someone else took care of him. Please Kami, let him be okay. _I rocked back and forth with eachs syllable, willing the gods above to hear me.

"A girl named...TenTen...helped him regain his...path. Every...day...she came to check on him." He paused, having trouble with his words. His eyes were bleak. "The beginning was...the hardest. He lost...weight...he lost his appetite."

An indistinguishable sound came from my lips. "No...it's my fault. Mine."

Karu shook his head. "You must understand, Hinata, it was...not because you left. Incidentally, I think if he had never met you he would be happier. More carefree. No, the fact that you _argued_ all those times...and _then_you left...Hinata, don't you understand that words hurt more deeply than physical wounds at times? That injuries heal, but you will always remember insults and fights?"

I jerked my head.

"Now do you see how important it is to come back to Konoha?"

Fear slapped me out of my trance. I jumped up. "No! No," I said, "_No._"

"Hinata..." He pushed his chair away suddenly, and bent down on his knees.

"Karu!" I cried, the sound alien. Arisa's voice was supremely cultivated and soft and lilting - this was - "What the hell are you doing?!"

"I'm begging." His eyes were hollow.

"No!" I shrieked. "Don't - Karu - please - " The man who had driven me around, joked with light humor, such a uplifting person - _he was gone_ - now he was begging - no - don't -

Horrified, I pulled his arm up. "Don't do this, Karu," I tried. "Don't degrade yourself! You're worth more than this. Please don't do this - "

"Then come back."

The words hit me like a tsunami. I backed away. "N-no. No."

"Don't you dare turn your back now, Hinata. You're a fool. You _coward_."

My fingernails swiped at the wall behind me.

"_I don't want to go back. I'm scared, Karu. It's been - it's been too long. _I'm scared."

"Don't be scared," he whispered. "You can always become stranger."

He said this with such conviction, such honesty. Wrinkles crowded his forehead.

"I - oh, Karu." I was a little girl again. "No..." I ran forward, pulled him up. He stumbled. "I..." His face was wet with tears. "I'll go, Karu." Such words had never been so full of relief. "I - I'll go. I'll go. I'll go. _I'll go_."

He patted me shoulder, pulled me close.

"Atta girl. Atta girl."

We cried together.

* * *

**Comments? Concerns? I bet it was a crappy chapter - I'm sorry about the length. **

**Reviews would be appreciated!!**

**BC**


	4. Enter Neji

**mwth06**: It IS sad! One of the reasons I write is because I feel depressed sometimes XD  
**iAmAnDaLwAySwIlLbE**: You're welcome!  
**Piisa**: Atta girl means, like, "Go girl!" Or, "That's my girl," in a friendly manner.  
**Kawaii** **Kabu**: I love his attitude too -sobbing face-  
**Random** **Person**: I'm sorry for the over-drmaticism. I noticed the same thing...  
**biawutnow**: Sasuke will come at...hm...fifth or sixth chapter?  
**girl**-**of**-**anime**: I hope this chap is longer!  
**emzly**: Thank you XP By the way I love your new story with ChocoGONEsushi. The plot is AMAZING.  
**chocoGONEsushi**: As usual, I luv you XD  
**vanessa1822**: It's so hard writing Hinata In character. I'll try harder!!  
**winterkaguya**: He is basically a surrogate father, I guess. It's pretty cool!  
**Gaara's** **Little** **Girl**: -blushes with praise-  
**mexican**-**egyptianhybrid**: Thank you, gracias :)  
**inspira748**: HI HELEN!! How's the Celfo?  
**KibaIsHOTT**: Thanks! I like your penname XD  
**Lacrymosa17**: KaruHina...-blech- Ha, you made me laugh.  
**Eternally** **Loved**: Now I did!! Did you know you were the FIRST reviewer for I am Hinata Hyuuga??  
**n1njofth3cunn1n3ss**: THANKS!!  
**NikkiTheHyugaChick**: I'm a rebel too...-does a weird face- I can't believe I haven't read your story yet...I've been incredibly busy, and I will!!  
**Monochrome** **Skies**: I go for interesting!!  
**RunningBarefootAtMidnight**: Again, I LOVE your penname! ...(am thinking of changing mine again. Lol.)

I really, really appreciate your reviews. This story practically exists for that.

This sloooow update was for three reasons:

Rewrote it two times-  
Writer's block-  
Difficulty at getting a certain character _In_ Character, even after the time skip - namely, Neji-

And here's the next chap.

* * *

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**Au Contraire, Madam  
Four: Enter Neji**

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

The next day was chilly and overcast. Gray clouds hung like balloons low in the sky, drooping with the heavy rainwater.

In my house I made an excessive amount of dark strong coffee, draining it all.

I glanced in the mirror, and wished I hadn't. Dark lines spread underneath my eyes due to exhaustion. My skin was dull. No life. I pulled on the closest shirt I could find, dressed, and started the car.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

At precisely eight 'clock I drove up to the theatre. Karu stood by the door with two large duffel bags and an air of excitement.

"Don't you have a car?" I queried.

"Nah. I gave the old red convertible to Neji. His car went in an accident. I take the bus here everyday."

"Oh."

He shot me a quizzical look. "You know what to do."

I smiled solemnly. "You wait here." He acquiesced.

When I walked in, sliding apart the two immense glass doors, I surveyed everything around me. I'd worked here for three years. Acting. The cool air blew around me, a cold draft starting from nowhere.

Today would be my last day here.

I inhaled deeply, exhaled, and knocked on the office door. As always, Hikaru opened it, having the appearance of one under great stress.

"What?" he questioned, irritated. "You're thirty minutes _early_."

Not knowing how to beat around the bush, I stuck to the facts.

"I'm resigning."

The words did not have the effect I'd hoped for. They didn't do the slightest thing, save for a quick raise of the eyebrows. And a snort.

Three seconds later he was doubled over, laughing.

"Oh, that's a good one. Ah haha, kneeslapper!" He paused. "The stage crew guy must've taught you some, didn't he? Ni-i-ice acting. Perfect! At this rate - "

"His name is Karu."

Hikaru was indifferent. He waved it away.

"Ah, Karu, Shmaru, who cares. Nice job, Arisa. You got it down pat!"

I breathed out slowly and let my mind wander to four years ago, to the people I had conversationed with, lived with, some, even - _loved_. The people who were my friends, whom I had _abandoned_.

I felt hot tears seep into my eyes.

...If Hanabi were in this situation she would keep smiling until he gave up.

...If it were Neji, he would just shake his head and walk away.

...If it were Sasuke, he would _glower_ until Hikaru melted into a piddling pile of goo.

...If it were Karin, she would get right up to his face and act scary.

...If it were Naruto, he would declare that this was a free country, and he would go anyways.

...If it were Sakura, she'd punch the living daylights out of him for standing in her way.

...If it were Chouji, he'd probably rant off a million foods until Hikaru got sick of him.

...If it were Shikamaru, he would say "no" like a broken radio, because he was too lazy to say any other words.

...If it were TenTen she would grin _happily_ and _skip_ out of the building.

...If it were Ino she'd challenge, "Watch me go."

...If it were Gaara he'd flip Hikaru the love/and/or peace sign and walk out.

...If it were Temari she'd stay polite in her lady-like way but decline.

...If it were Kiba he'd mutter something incoherent and walk out.

...If it were Rock Lee, he'd apologize profusely...but _stand his ground_.

_What...about...me...?_

I opened my eyes. The tears were gone. Hikaru was already looking at something else. He thought I was a nuisance, that my words were false. Just acting. Nothing else.

Acting. _Acting._ All that I'd become.

_What...about...me...?_

I flicked some lint off my shirt, cleared my throat.

"Thank you. I _know_ I've 'got it down pat'. But it's no use, you know? 'Cause I quit, remember?"

He finally looked up. "W-what?"

I shook his hand. He did not shake back. What a snot.

"It's been a good three years. But now it's over. I quit."

I turned my back to his flabbergasted face.

I couldn't resist.

"Sayonara, sucker."

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

I walked out of the building with the hugest smile on my face since I could remember. Genuinely.

Karu grinned. "Ready to rock? I'm driving." He had sunglasses pushed up his hair. Note that it was a cloudy day.

"You're driving?" I echoed weakly, getting in the back for more leg space.

"Don't diss the master. Let's hit the road."

I smiled, my eyes swimming with tears for some unexplainable reason. I felt like I'd belonged. I looked away, out the window.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

On the way I fiddled with my jacket, I played with the seat belt, I examined my nails. The trees soared past, making a green blur on the window.

"Don't be nervous."

We were nearing Konoha at every second - we were on the highway - but how could I not be worried? "Nervous," I repeated faintly. "I...how would _you_ feel if you walked out of a place and didn't return until at least three years later?"

He sighed and pulled up to load gasoline. "Point taken."

I nodded.

"Point taken, rolled up, and tossed aside, that is.

The truth was, honestly - I had never been more anxious in my life. This was not acting. It was the real thing, not simply played out onstage by a cast of well-prepared actors.

I was terrified at their reactions-to-be.

Impulsively I flipped open the laptop and typed in the u.r.l. for the chat room.

**UKnockMySoxOff**: Hey! It's so early...

**AC**: 10:49?

**UknockMySoxOff**: oh. - curses -I'm late for rope climbing!

**AV**: Rope climbing?

**UKnockMySoxOff**: Part of our camp. We've gotta teach little kids...

**AV**: We? As in...

**UKnockMySoxOff**: Us 7 Musketeers. -i didn't make up the name.

**UKnockMySoxOff**: We're 7 camp counselors!

**UKnockMySoxOff**: It's a lotta fun! Except I'm supposed 2 be there at 9:30...at least it's a Friday. we go home today!

**UKnockMySoxOff**: S - I mean, RGreen, is screaming. Bye.

**AV**: Bye. Good luck.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

By this time we were already over the border. In Konoha. I pressed the window down and smelled the incredibly sweet aroma of hay and sunshine. "I'm back," I half-whispered, the cool breeze windswept. I felt as though I might cry, "and I'm here to stay."

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

Despite the coffee and my determination to stay awake I fell into a deep sleep. The road was smooth and pothole-free.

When I awoke, I was stunned; it was so _bright _in Konoha. The sun shone down without shame, burning through my retinas, hot on my skin.

"What time is it?" I mumbled groggily, sitting up.

"Almost two in the afternoon. Thirty more minutes."

Thirty more minutes. Seeing others in thirty more minutes. The suffering was almost tangible. Did they know I was coming, coming once again? What did they all look like? Did they change? Did _I_ change?

"I'm pulling over for a quick break."

"Mm hmm." I got off the car and opened the door to the gas station. Cheesy music and cool air conditioner greeted me.

In the bathroom I washed my face and decided that, no, I didn't want to be Arisa Voce anymore. As I eyed my longer hair I searched in my pocket until my fingers unearthed the little X acto knife.

I started to cut away, every strand of hair grabbed firmly in my hands.

* * *

"Well, here we are, folks." The car pulled over to a long, winding driveway. Tree shadows laced up the aphsalt.

I shut my eyes and tried to reach the front door, tripping over the garden and over two steps. Finaly I staggered to the door and shoved the doorbell. My fingers found nothing. On the second attempt it rang.

"Is Neji...?" I whispered fearfully.

"No." I heard Karu take the keys from under the mat. I'd forgotten about that.

"Neji's participating in some sleep-away summer camp. He'll be back today. Hanabi's been at a dance convention for a year in Rain Village."

"Oh." I felt both excruxiating disappointment and relief.

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

In the house, I opened my eyes, dazzled.

Beautiful.

In the waning afternoon sun, the glass reflected like several thousand crystals. Tiny shards of light beamed across the hazy shadows. Snaking like an anaconda, the stairs curved several times before finally resting to the top.

I spun around giddily, loving the comfort of - of - _home_.

I spent the afternoon sleeping, after taking a shower, tapped from staying up last night.

My room was a pile of dust. It was - get this - _exactly - _the same, except that it was incredibly dusty. I weighed the chances of no one cleaning my room for three or four years. The probability was big. Books rested on top of one another, dust piled a few centimeters thick. The same mahogany drawer sat calmly in the corner. At least the bed was clean, and made.

Facing the mirror, I wondered what I would wear. I'd worn the same shirt for a couple of days, uncomfortably.

Memories of Arisa Voce were strangely twisted. Shallow. As I took off the shirt it ripped.

The result was awfully scanty.

"Hi! I'm an enormous slut!"

That didn't seem quite right. I decided on a navy jacket and loose jeans. Comfortable and appealing. As I rounded the corner downstairs, Karu was reading the newspaper.

"This house needs major spring cleaning," was the first thing I said to Karu. He smiled sheepily but nodded in agreement.

"Detergent. Bleach. Soap. Now."

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

With Karu's help I managed to clean the kitchen, the family room, all upstairs, the living room, and all the bathrooms. He used a broom, a vacuum cleaner, and a mop; I took the manual route and bent down on the knees and scrubbed.

The sun set slowly int he horizon. I pushed food into the microwave and punched in two minutes.

It smelled so good. I hadn't eaten home-cooked food in ages.

When Karu saw what I had done he immediately gave a yell and threw his sponge onto the floor, flinging open the microwave door in one fell swoop.

I gave hm a quizzical look. "What?"

"The lid is metal. You don't cook metal in microwaves," he explained.

"Oh. Oh. I'm so stupid."

The sound of a door closing made me swallow. I didn't need to look at Karu to know that the person was Neji. Neji; the last person I'd spoke to before leaving Konoha. Neji; whom I had hurt so deeply.

I wanted desperately to bolt like a bunny rabbit, run to anywhere but here. The footsteps came closer; my heart pounded - I heard the blood rush in my ears.

The footsteps reached the kitchen and I heard a male voice.

"H, Karu. I'm home."

I pounded down my fear, raised my head, and met his eyes.

* * *

"Hello," I tried to say as firmly as I could. My voice didn't waver, though I couldn't stop myself from trembling.

He had grown taller in those three years. His hair was longer, much longer, pulled back - and he wore a gray pullover and shorts.

A battered bag was hung carelessly over his shoudler. His eyes conveyed...astonishment. His mouth opened, and closed.

We must have stood there for at least a full minute before Karu shamelessly broke the silence.

"Well, I'll leave you two guys to sort things out, okay?" To my horror he exited the room, looking as if he might whistle.

Neji stood there.

I couldn't breathe.

A bird outside cheeped in all its glory. As if on cue, I inhaled and took two steps back.

Promptly, he turned around. His footsteps trailed upstairs.

I exhaled.

Slowly I replayed the events in my mind. What went wrong? Was it my fault? I had said - hello - hadn't I? Did he know it was me? Did he still hate me? The most prominant question sounded precarious in my mind, "How will I face him?'

After the homecooked meal - now ice-cold, I returned upstairs. His room was right next to mine, and his door was now shut.

I knocked, gradually feeling the fire pit start to swallow me up.

There was no response.

I turned away. Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow I'd confront him. Maybe...maybe _never_.

With a clang the door opened inwardly. He stood in the doorway.

All of a sudden I couldn't move. Did he know how intimidating he was?

"N-neji? Is..."

"Hi," he said softly, his eyes wide with disbelief. "You're back..."

Suddenly I remembered how I'd pushed him away at the airport. My head swam. "I'm sorry."

He looked at me seriously, his gaze searching.

"I'm so sorry. I'm..." My heart hammered. Confessions weren't my strong point. "...back...?"

I backed up and started to pace, my cool air succumbing to nervousness.

"I left you that d-day, and I realized..." Sweat trickled down my forehead. God, it was hot. "...that I didn't know much about you, and I..."

Red spots danced across my eyes. Too bright. I felt dizzy. The atmosphere was unbearable; why didn't he change expressions? Be angry, annoyed, sad...surprised...

I swallowed. "That I...shouldn't have treated you that way. K-karu told me about...quitting..." I fiddled with my shirt sleeve. Sweat poured down my neck, making my hair matted and damp. Once my gaze left his, I knew I couldn't look up again. I hadn't the courage.

"It's not your fault," he murmured. "I wasn't civil to you either."

It took several seconds of agonizing silence for me to raalize what he had said.

"It's over now," he continued, as if talking about some long lost event, "and I'm glad of that." Aburptuly I heard him stride up to me in a single fluid leap, and embraced me in a hug.

"Neji," I choked out, "C-can't breathe..."

He let go and leaned back expectantly. "You're back."

"I'm back," I echoed weakly.

There was no happiness. There was no sadness, tragedy - all that was left in the past. I felt no shame. All that enveloped the atmosphere was a sick kind of apprehension.

I would change myself. I would not hurt anyother people.

I _will_ be changed.

* * *

**Rather long chapter, I hope.**

Sorry for the slow update, and oh yeah, I'll probably update faster, just so ya know. I really have nothing else to say; I hope you do!


	5. AN

Hi everyone.

I might as just say it.

I'll be on hiatus, frozen, petrified. I know all of you hate me for saying that. I've just come to a realization. I don't think most of you would understand, though. If you want to know, PM me. But it's not like it really matters.

Well, hiatus it is, save for three exceptions:

Serendipity: I won't be continuing it. Either the story will be up for grabs, meaning any of your aspiring authors can continue it, or I'll just delete it. It's collected too much dust, and I can't think of anything more to write for that story.

-The Journal _will_ be going to normal schedule. No hiatus. I'll probably update soon, I hope.

-Third: Also, My StepBrother Sasuke will be normal, too. Sorry for not posting the second chapter yet. I will.

Notice done, I hope I'll continue in around a week or two, okay? Don't worry; I will continue. But also, there's a chance I won't continue Spring in My Heart.

Don't bombard me with flames.

H.H.

PS. Hallie, Meels, I love you. Give me condolence, pleeeaz. I feel like my life is over.


	6. Continuation Notice If Interested

Dear readers,

I'm thinking of starting up this story again. From the beginning, the story preceding this one - _I am Hinata Hyuuga_ - had been my brainchild from two years ago. It's one of the pieces I'm not particularly proud of because it's not very well written - as is not _Au Contraire, Madam_ - but it was a story full of inspiration and the author behind it wasn't afraid to write what she wanted to, even if there were plotholes or terrible dialogue.

But it _was_ from the heart; as a result, the writing, though not well-written, was simple and pithy and effective. _Au Contraire, Madam_ is like that.

I don't know if I can write like that again. I've written too much: I experienced NaNoWriMo and whipped up 51,600 words in thirty days. And I've written more stories and short stories, not on Fanfiction.. In fact, I haven't physically written on Fanfiction in a long time - read and reviewed, but not actively participated by writing.

I didn't think I'd come back.

And maybe I won't. Maybe the new plots in my mind are too precious for posting out there in the Internet - I wouldn't want to get plagiarized, of course. So I'm probably not going to post any _new_ stories up here. Just continue the old one(s), because I know sure as heck that _nobody_ wants to plagiarize them ;)

But what I'm asking you is if you're interested that I continue _Au Contraire, Madam_. I do realize that it's really rather cliche and coincidental at many points. I can't fix it, because that would be like erasing the writer I was at age 13 or 14 (I'm fifteen), but by continuing the story, I won't have that empty space in my heart that I feel when looking at the _In Progress_ sign at my profile.

So are you interested? of me continuing? I think I'd need at least 20 readers to resepond or message me to continue. I do have approximately a quarter of the next chapter of this story written, but I'm not sure I can continue by myself.

Are you game?

Love,

LuLu.

_December 5, 2009_


	7. Karin

**I'm baaaaaaack. (!)**

* * *

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

**Chapter Five: Karin**

**X**xxxxx**X**xxxxx**X**

When I arrived at the camp there were lush trees surrounding everywhere. A sea of green seemed to materialize the instant my eyes left the bus. It was all very discerning. The city wasn't like this. It had forgotten to live, to breathe, to live with nature. The road turned curvy and the edges, indistinct against the gravel, the bus bumbling along.

The familiar sensation of nervousness came into my stomach.

I'd never been far from the city ever since I'd taken the job there – somehow it seemed like I was violating the sacred rights, stepping into the void, the past life, somewhere I was no longer associated with: somewhere that did neither needed me nor wanted me.

Boarding the bus had been easy. Packing had been laughingly facile compared to those times I'd stayed for hotel rooms. It was so much simpler in knowing you were going to a camp.

The necessities were needed – toiletries, to be sure, things like toothbrush and floss and a towel. The clothes had been harder but still not complicated to pack. T-shirts that hadn't been touched for months now were washed, folded up neatly, and placed at the bottom of the suitcases. Next came the shorts and capris. Of course there were the underclothes – several pairs; I knew I'd get messy with nature trails and suchlike.

Then I came to a halt. Absurd things like makeup weren't needed. Surprisingly I found out I wasn't a makeup sort of person. Sure, I looked better with it on – which girl didn't? – and Hikaru, the manager, had of course demanded it, claiming, he "couldn't look a makeup-less girl in the face because she was so ugly, so plain and bare."

But it was different this time, and additionally I no longer wore my hair in a stiff curled hair-sprayed style; on the contrary, the shoulder-length wisps flew about my face. A severe part no longer split my scalp to right and left; that look had been reserved for a businesswoman, an actress, and I no longer played the part.

_No longer played the part_. The words echoed uncomfortably in my mind, now seemingly so relaxed and more empty without the accessories of schedules and what to wear and when to wear it. The part where I'd walked out on my job was still etched freshly in my memories, as I knew it would. Things like that haunted the soul, where you know you're doing the right thing, but you perpetually feel bad about other people's feelings.

A grating stop commanded vibrations up and down the length of the bus and underneath my feet. The other passengers were standing, stretching their legs, waiting for the person in front to get into the aisle and keep moving.

I sat in my seat, peering out the window. I wanted to memorize it, if only to try to send good feelings to the memory I would create of it. Whatever happens here, I told myself firmly, it started with something good. If all else goes badly, I'll salvage this piece of happiness left. The happiness of knowing that I arrived of my own volition on the bus; that I decided I would face my past and continue it into the future and continue old bonds. I did this. And even if…even if things don't turn out as I would love them to turn out – perfectly, with everyone forgiving the terrible deeds I've done – at least I can say, at the end, that I tried.

_That I tried_.

A funny feeling came to my throat. Perhaps it was because I hadn't tried anything for myself in over two years. The command had always came from the upper echelon – managers, maybe, or the top actor or actress, or the director. For those two years I had acted the part of the strictly written play and I had deviated from the playwright's intentions. Those playwrights must be, I thought, very happy somewhere in the world, unknowingly, because I followed every single word, memorized every single italicized action in brackets, and delivered the whole thing with false gusto and a pure characterization of whichever part I was playing.

This was different, right now. I was dimly aware of the hot beating of my heart, but the blood somehow didn't reach my hands. My hands were deathly cold, and shaking, as I gripped the back of the seat in front of me, and let myself up, the last person on the bus.

I followed the person before me, an old man who wore a green shirt that had _Camp Janitor_ on the back, and gave a timid thanks to the bus driver. My last connection, I thought hazily, of the outside world. After this it's all camp, all people I don't know because I haven't seen them in so long, all past.

Nothing of the world I knew; nothing of the future I _would_ know.

It would all turn out here, and as the bus slowly drove away I stood with my luggage with my heart beating heavily and in a strange excited way; suddenly I was a precocious, nervous teenager once again and I was in a exotic place like a new school.

Karu was not here and Neji was arriving later, two weeks later, because that was his break over summer. He had offered to come up with me, but I had declined, saying he duly deserved, out of all people, a break. Heaven knew he worked all his energy into this camp. Neji was that type of person. And at my words he only looked at me seriously and said, "Good luck."

I didn't know if I would need it. Perhaps he knew I would need it, so he said it; Neji was not one to say extra words.

Perhaps, I thought worriedly, I would _most definitely_ need it. Perhaps my old, um, compatriots – for lack of better word – had grown sterner and more harsh over the years. Perhaps they had gotten more muscular. Perhaps they would beat up –

No, I forced myself to think, to obtain a bright smile (they say that faking a smile makes a real one take its place soon enough).

As I entered the gates of _Camp Adventuresome_, a man in red came over and took my luggage, smiling.

"Wait," I called. "I don't have money to pay you. And I don't know where I'm living."

His gaze was brown-eyed and steady. "You don't need to pay me," he said. I had a feeling that other people would laugh at me for saying such things, but this man didn't. I was grateful; perhaps this camp was famous for hiring stalwart workers; "and I'll just put this in the lobby. You can look for it later and take it yourself, or call someone to take it to your cabin later."

"Oh, I…thank you. Thanks very much. I – I appreciate it."

"Not a problem," he said easily, as if he eased young women's fears every day. "Thank _you_ for your stay here."

And then the worker was gone, and I stood there with palms that were damp with cold sweat.

"Thank…thank you," I said again to no one in particular, just to try to alleviate the uneasy feeling in my stomach, the nervousness that had risen so suddenly in my throat, that threatened to have me running out of the camp with one sign of danger.

And as I walked about three hundred feet more into the camp, that one sign of danger abruptly, as if summoned, came.

I hadn't expected at all to see a former classmate to early on. I had expecting to go to my cabin, perhaps, or find a bathroom, and hyperventilate for a few hours, telling myself it was okay and recollecting the nerves that had frayed to threads. I didn't get that chance.

And maybe, I thought later, it was a good thing. Because if I had been given that chance to mull things over, I would surely have gave up and my will would have buckled underneath the weight of worries. I would have called a taxi from the city – an hour's drive – and sat staring at nothing in the bathroom while waiting for the taxi. Maybe I'd be so intent on getting out the camp, out of my past, I'd forget my luggage.

But before I could consider this, the person had stopped and looked at me.

It was Karin, and from the expression on her face, she was _astonished_ to see me. I knew I'd dabbed all makeup off and had cut my hair to the short bob it had been in teenage years, and my eyes were off from the contacts, but I suppose it was more than that. I was changed inside, too.

The last time I'd seen her was a few months ago, where she'd been a co-actress when Satski had been sick.

And the time before that, I had stepped out of Konoha Boarding School.

(After having dumped an entire bottle of barbecue sauce on her).

"Hoooo!' said Karin, blowing out air like the sound an owl makes, in a very surprised sort of way. I blinked; this _was_ reality. In my reality, Karin had acted very snotty-like and we had continued our fight. And she did not say things like "hoooo!" Maybe, I thought, she got connected with her real sense of self, more nature-like.

Offhandedly another voice in my mind rapped out, _That was mean . _

I know, I replied to the voice. I'm sorry.

Karin looked at me closely. "I'm sorry, too," she told me.

I supposed I'd said those words aloud; it was no use reeling them back in. What had been done was done. I hadn't meant to apologize to her so quickly, but now that I had - inadvertently or not - I was glad.

"Back then...I...um, I was a teenager," I finished weakly. "I suppose four years have passed." What I didn't tell her was that I had been Arisa Voce, too. She had been _admiring_ of Arisa Voce, and that was one emotion farthest from what I needed right now; false emotion for a false part I had acted.

"And back then, I was one bitchy person," Karin said to me directly. "I got everything I wanted through my bitchiness – boys, money from my parents, clothes, too – and then I _learned_, through the medium of _your_ bitchiness – no, don't blush, Hinata, it's com_men_dable – that _my_ bitchiness would have to pay. Through barbecue sauce. Lovely, no? So I've been learning."

She finished talking; evidently she had rehearsed this previously in her head before; and she smiled brilliantly. A true smile. An ocean of a smile.

"Me too. Really. I'm sorry."

Four years ago her eyes would have narrowed and she'd have spat at me. Now those eyes behind her glasses softened and grew limpid.

"I was very angry," she admitted. "But it wasn't a big deal after all. In the big scheme of things barbecue sauce on clothes and bedspread is easily washed off."

"Really?" I asked, relieved.

"Well, no," she said. "Because I was too busy freaking out and being furious after you'd left that it sort of stained my clothes permanently. I took too long. I was busy…oh, busy telling everyone you were the goddess from hell," she clarified, raising her eyebrows. "Looking back, that's totally a lose-lose situation. I mean, I trampled on your reputation, but how good is mine gonna look if I'm cursing you out in an ugly soppy suit?"

"Not good," I said softly.

"Exactly," she said, and the conversation broke off there. She stared at me, as if to see how much my face had changed.

And I was sure that at least my eyes were changed; that much I could tell her, could know, instinctively. My eyes had changed; they weren't the eyes of a teenage girl. They were the eyes of someone who had had her share of problems and was trying to face them.

And her eyes met mine and I truly understood what forgiveness was about.

--

X

--

I was in my cabin fifteen minutes later, and a nicer-looking cabin anywhere in camp, or in the world, for that matter, there wasn't. Mine was of real wood and a wooden, though somewhat polished, comfortable floor. I had a bunk bed and I was currently bent on sleeping on the lower one because there was a spider web on the wall near the higher bunk.

"No one," Karin told me, "is right now in need of a cabin. So you're all alone."

Despite our moment earlier, I still felt bungling, awkward, around her. Now that our past feelings and grudges had been accepted, I wondered about the four years that had happened _after_ our rivalry. Where she went to college. What she did. What all my former-classmates did.

But most of all, I thought hazily, a certain person.

"Except," Karin continued, "for Sakura."

"Sakura?" I voiced. "...Haruno?" Dimly I remembered her; only dimly. That entire year I'd had all but two words with her.

And I remembered in the beginning of boarding school, she'd been couples.

With him.

"Yes, Sakura. She went back for her break about a week and a half ago. She'll be coming in two days."

"She needs a room?'

"Her old cabin got taken by some new campers. And I think it's best that she board with another counselor, not by herself. Besides, you'll like company, too. Goddess knows how lonely you've been!"

"Another counselor? Me?"

"Yes," said Karin briefly, simply. "We need all hands we can get. This is a small but efficient camp. The parents here are really very satisfied, but counselors are always lacking."

"The parents won't be satisfied after I'm done counseling," I muttered underneath my breath. It was more nervousness than spite or sarcasm that propelled this remark of doubt.

"You," said Karin, "need to lighten up. And I don't mean physically. (Goddess knows how pale you're getting without sunshine). I mean soul-wise, personality-wise."

"I," said I, "need to get out of here. I'm not a _counselor_. I can't run my own life."

"Ahh," she said wisely. "Neither could I, when I started. But you learn."

"Learn?"

She leaned, dragging the bedspread in her two thin hands, and shook it. "As in, I didn't know either, when I cam here." Her eyes gazed at mine. "But you learn. Really, you do."

"How?" I persisted.

She waved a hand. "Through experience, through knowledge - it's hard to explain! But my somehow taking care of _other_ people - the campers - you wind up taking care of yourself more, too."

"The giving principle," I said softly.

"Huh?"

"That's what Karu told me once. My manager. He told me once, that by giving things to others, in turn you'll get the exact thing for yourself. Like giving love, you're giving yourself love and receiving it from other people."

Karin's eyes briefly closed. "Smart man, he is."

"That's...what I think." Unconsciously I kicked at an empty green bucket near the doorway, not hard enough to knock it over. "I told him to go away that time. I told him I didn't believe it, that is was crap."

"Oh." Karin looked at me. "That's unfortunate. Can you tell him otherwise, now?"

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe he's forgotten, though. It was over two years ago." I amended my words. "But maybe - chances are, actually - that he hadn't forgotten. I've learned that words like that aren't easily forgotten - words that leave your lips unthinkingly. It cuts the other person's soul and sears into memory."

"You sound like you've been through it all," said Karin.

"No," I said. "There's a lot more to come."

She finished cleaning and dusting the room and took my luggage and pushed it neatly against my bed. "Well," she said. "It sounds like you did O.K. with your life so far. So don't be afraid in what's 'to come'."

"So far?" I wanted to laugh hollowly, but I couldn't. Laughter was still such a foreign thing, even fake laughter. "I did terrible things."

"Terrible sh-merrible," sang Karin merrily. She laughed, easily. I envied her. "There are _so_ many more worse things; let me assure you, darling."

And she opened the window and let the sunshine all in, and paused in the doorway.

"There's thirty minutes," she told me, "until dinnertime. I take it that you want to set up your things, get yourself situated? Maybe call - " she winked " - your manager and tell him what enlightenment, what realization, you've come to?

Oh," she added, now fully out the door and maybe a few yards away. She had to half-shout. "The lobby's easy enough to find. Take a left and keep going. It's the big building with a red roof. Not the type of building you'd miss."

"Thanks," I called after her. And then she was striding out across the sunshine. "Wait!" Something large leapt into my throat. I didn't want to be alone again, somehow. "I forgot to ask you..."

She was gone.

* * *

**Anyone liefer to hazard a guess who Hinata had forgot to ask about? Hint is a _who_. I'd take it that it's slightly obvious :)**

**I've come back :)**

**So I'm just going to completely take the bull by the horns and update. And I promise that I'll keep updating. I swear. If not only for that handful of readers that responded who have become my inspiration.**

**And I realize it's terrible for readers because I haven't updated. I don't want to para-phrase, though, as in, summarize. It doesn't take the story into good words much at all. So if you have time (or if you still remember, which is nigh impossible), I'd ask of you to read the previous chapter. Or chapters. Or even _I am Hinata Hyuuga_. Ahaha.**

**I do realize that's a lot to ask of you :) **

**And it really is O.K. if you don't liefer do it (I _love_ that word), because writing this story is my own challenge, my own fulfillment, my own ending. It's for myself, too, and I think I can become a better writer and a better understander through writing this story.**

**Thank you.**

**LuLu**

**PS. And dear readers, have you noticed if my writing has**

**changed/  
improved/  
deteriorated (not possible, I hope)/  
become author-worthy**

**I'm just kidding on that last one.**


	8. Hanabi

**Chapter 6: Hanabi**

* * *

--

--

On that first day, I did not see him.

When I was gone for those four years, he had scarcely crossed my mind because I was consciously, every time, blotting him out, focusing on screenplay and characters rather than the image of his face, or the sound of his voice, or how he strode across the room. Gradually, I…admit it now, his face had even disappeared from my dreams every night. It was as if my unconscious had gradually conceded, and was giving up along with the defeated conscious. But this had been the way I had wanted it, even if it had given me headaches and restless nights, trying too hard not to think about him.

I had thought about the others, yes, during those years, but I had thought about him the most.

--

--

Sakura moved in the day after. I had been expecting her arrival, of course, but I still jumped at the sight of the foot of the bunk bed, now harboring two suitcases. Hers was pink and lavishly decorated, with photo stickers and signs that read like, "Cleverly disguised as a responsible teenager." She awsn't a teenager anymore – we all weren't – but it was still nice to think about her having the suitcase for at least a couple of years. In fact it made me feel nostalgic.

Nostalgia, however, was plainly the last thing Sakura was feeling at that moment, as she swept through the bathroom door holding up the white turban on her head with both slim arms.

"Hi," she said shortly, making direct eye contact.

"Hi. How was your trip?"

"Fine. Perfect. I'm glad to be back," she said frankly. She bent down and began rubbing her hair between the towel in a fast brisk motion. It looked like she was doing all this faster than she would have normally done. Her hands were a blur.

When finished, she tossed the used towel into the plastic laundry basket, grabbed some things from her suitcase (she was very organized, it seemed, and did this with utmost alacrity and efficiency).

She looked into the crude hanging mirror piece for the briefest of moments, something I always wished I could do, and, not wasting another second, bounded down the couple of stairs, and was on her way.

I was the only living thing now, inside the cabin, and I slowly left it, doing a meticulous and nervous 180 of all the things in the cabin and what I would need. I know I couldn't have done what she had done so effortlessly in front of that mirror, so I simply didn't look into it.

I paused in the doorway, looking back into the room, my hand hovering at the light switch.

I had a funny feeling I was forgetting something. Or maybe it was needing something, someone to talk to. But of course I found neither in this dingy little cabin, and so I flipped off the light switch, shaking my head, and headed down the steps.

The last thing I saw in the cabin was Sakura's limp, discarded, disappointed towel.

--

--

"Welcome," began Karin, "to the twenty-third induction ceremony of Camp Adventuresome."

Exultations of cheering exploded at her words. I looked around, bemused. The cheering mainly came from a section of male counselors, a rowdy group of seven or so. With a jump in heart rate I noticed the corn-silk yellow hair of Naruto among the heads, and Kiba's unruly spikes.

With something twisting in my gut I realized that these people had not separated from their class of 2007. They had stuck together through it all, even during college. They had stuck through, I thought, crushes, the curiosities and allure of drugs, and careers, and college, and arguments, and break-ups. And they had survived a certain classmate walking out from their group.

How on Earth, I wondered, could they do that – have spirits and wills so strong, bonds so unbreakable, friendships so tight, loyalty so deep? Compared to this phenomena, acting was nothing special, even the best of Hollywood acting. It was the lowest of the low, compared to _this _– true bonds and true friendship.

But these people – these classmates of mine – had managed that. They had done this.

And flashes came through my mind, flashes of the future – celebrations in which I was not part of, times when some of their group would get married, congratulations sent to the births of their children, a 50-year-old anniversary of their friendship.

It was just like the TV show _Friends_, I thought. These people are bound to stick together through it all.

And what rose in me was not jealousy, or envy, or even hatred of their having accomplished such a feat – but a wonderment.

The induction ceremony went on and on and ended eventually, with new campers receiving the official badge of the camp and bursting with excitement at the assigning of roommates – but I didn't hear any of that. I was too busy looking with a certain sense of bewildered wonder how on earth I had experienced so much in my life, but never this - never this.

--

--

I woke with but a dim recollection of last night. The ceremony had lasted until nine o'clock; there had been a bonfire. I remembered being alone on the side looking into the mouth of the fire, my mind somewhere else. And then I had retired to my cabin before the fire was doused, and I had fallen asleep in my regular day clothes, too tired to bother, before Sakura had come in.

When my eyes opened now Sakura was already gone; I stood up and peered up, into a neatly ordained square of her bedspread. Then I glanced at the clock, and gave a start.

It was six o'clock, and I never awoke so early.

The reason, I discovered, was the cell phone in the jacket I had slept in. It had vibrated; now, unceasingly, it vibrated still.

"Hinata Hyuuga," I reported.

A silence panned on the cell phone. I had half a mind to shut it off, but a sudden feeling overtook me. "Who are you?" I asked quietly.

"_Hinata_," said a shocked voice, a very soft quivering voice, and suddenly I just knew; it was my sister on the other end of the phone.

She was sixteen now, and I had never felt more rotten in my life.

"Hanabi. I should try to explain – "

"You don't have to," she said very pithily, very tersely. The quavering in her voice was gone. I had never heard her more adamant-sounding, more composed. Recollections of her face pulsed in my mind once more; the very images I had forcefully banished in the recesses of my mind

"Hana – "

"I wrote you letters," she interrupted. "Did you receive them?"

"Letters?" I echoed. "No. I've never received a letter."

"How do I know you didn't take them and rip them up?" she demanded.

Smoothly I'd wanted this to go. It was impossible now. "I never received a letter," I repeated.

"Something in your voice says that your true feeling is, 'I never re_ceived_ a bloody letter, so hang up the phone, and leave me alone,'" said my sister. "You never acknowledged me those four years, so why should you know? It's only logical."

"I don't know what you are talking about. I never thought you did anything to contact me."

"Then you should have tried harder," Hanabi said passionately. "You should have stood your ground in trying to contact me, you should have made something out of it. You should have found a way."

"Those years," I began, and then paused. "I don't how to say this. Those years, I lost myself."

"Hinata," said Hanabi. "I didn't want anything from you. I just wanted you to say hi, say something to me, tell me I was living."

"Karu didn't – "

"He got drunk for a week after you left," her voice said shortly. "I must remind you, those scars after you left still show on his face, his eyes."

"Hanabi, I – "

"You can never erase that time," said my sister. "Which is why, even if Karu forgave you, I can't. Not now. Don't tell me, sister dear – I _don't_ want to hear. If you've changed I would like to meet you, perhaps, in person. But not now."

"But when, then?" I said desperately. My fingers were leaving marks on the phone, gripping it tightly.

Suddenly the only thing I wished in the world was to see my sister.

"I don't know. Maybe when you figure out how many agonizing seconds you'd...left me...in the dark." The phone hang up abruptly, the click signaling the cut of the line. Static followed. The deadest sound in the world.

I used to think it was over. Maybe I was right on that. Maybe past sins can never be atoned. But then maybe all this, I thought, was a dream, and nothing can hurt me feelings, get me frazzled.

But it was untrue, as much as I'd wished it to be otherwise. The tears fell, and after that, sobs that pulled my body to the bed and covered with the bed sheets.

--

--

When the sun fully rose into the sky, I dressed and entered the lobby with the red roof. It was the exact time when the campers were ready to start the day. Green-shirted counselors were milling around among the brightly colored kids. Most of them were either bent down, helping to tie the stray lace, or serving late breakfast.

I stood there for ten minutes, watching the campers forming a line. I saw Sakura busying herself with commanding a few children to stop blowing raspberries into each others' faces, and Kiba grimacing as a camper clung to his right leg. I must have looked awkward standing there, or plain not fitting. I wanted to start a conversation but my legs failed to move.

It was as if, I thought ironically, I was a teenager again, as if I'd never once been Arisa Voce, as if I had never, ever possessed that cool, unruffled exterior.

Maybe, I thought, I never had.

This beyond all depressed my spirits – the fact that maybe I _hadn't_ changed in these four years.

But then Karin called my name, and I remembered how she had changed, and maybe I had a little more faith in myself.

"Hinata," she said when she was in earshot. "Listen. Are you ready to counsel today?"

I looked at her, the confident arch of her red brows, hands sure on her hips. And I thought that I would _love_ to be her, in reach of her life, knowing her inner self the way I didn't.

But I wasn't there yet; I wasn't ready yet; so I said quietly, "Maybe tomorrow."

"That's absolutely fine. I'd probably suggest the same thing myself – you can just experience visually what happens today, and then tomorrow you'll be better prepared once you get a feel for things."

"Yes," I said, relieved. "That would work."

"Which is why," she carried on, "you'll be watching the rock-climbing group today. And in the afternoon, the kite group. Those activities are usually the most difficult to control. The first because it's moderately dangerous and takes a long time to set up; the second one because it covers a large area of grassland. So today you can not only get used to this, but maybe lend an extra pair of hands for the other counselors in charge."

I asked her where they were.

"The rock-climbing group starts in fifteen minutes. They get there by passing through the woods, to an outgrowth of rocks. It's really very convenient. Oh, and the kite group is much closer. We use the fields you can see when you look west."

"And who," I pursued, "are the other counselors?"

"The first group is Ino and Rock Lee. The second group," she continued, "includes Shikamaru and – "

I waited.

"Sasuke."

--

--

It was bound, I thought, to happen one day or another. He was the person far ahead of me, leading the throng of campers while I strayed in the very back. But somehow he turned around, and his eyes somehow - oh, _somehow - _picked out my spastic nervous eyes.

But instead looking shocked as I knew I did, he squinted through narrowed black eyes. And amid all the hustle and bustle of the campers milling through our path and around us, I could make out his words, as easily as a moth could have identified her mate – through pheromones, through _instinct_.

And with this now-fixed visage – flat and unemotional once again – he said the words - or rather, he mouthed them, but I could hear them clearly as if he had whispered intimately into my ear, _I thought you were dead._

He turned then, and as I saw the same raven hair, the same way his shoulders were so stiff, the same way he walked, turned, moved – Good God! It was as if nothing had changed in the last four years.

A true non-conformist, I thought, and at that moment something true and deep tugged at my heartstrings.

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**Instead of trying to make this story overly complicated or over-thought out or setting a definite update schedule, I'm just trying to get back on track. Something simple.**

**I'm trying to love it :)**


	9. Middle Ground

**maybe he's right.****  
****maybe there _is_ something wrong with me.****  
****I just don't see how a world****  
****that makes such wonderful things…  
could be bad.**

~Part of Your World, _The Little Mermaid_

* * *

**yashi14, Bre - thanks for urging me to update!**

**RunningBarefootAtMidnight - thank you, thank you, and I still love your penname :) **

**tiny . coco . chan - you are my rock; thanks for your review.**

**&**

**(a quick but rather important notice on the bottom for my other fanfics.)**

* * *

**Chapter Seven:****  
**_Middle Ground_

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--

--

I stared at his back, a stolid uncompromising wall, for a few more moments before following the opposite way and pretending the encounter had not affected me. I touched the bottom of my lip, where my trembling was at its worst, and collected myself. I told myself to look forward, and saw long blond hair that was vividly leading the campers. Far ahead of her a familiar-sort of bowl-cut head was herding campers as fast as he could out of the lobby.

Then the possessor of the blond hair confirmed who I thought she was, and her voice blared out. The strident tones caused several little campers next to her to stick their index fingers into their eardrums. Suddenly there was no more time for quivery lips or about-to-cry feelings.

"Heeey!" Ino screeched. "Lee! Back at here! These kids – I'm being swamped by them. It's nice of you to just skip off with a few campers and pretend you're doing your part – "

The voice had reached glass-breaking proportions. Wincing, I pushed as lightly as I could through the crowd and stopped, tapped her on the shoulder.

"I'll help."

"Thanks for your offer," Ino said in normal tones without looking at me, "but only counselors can lead the kids, and seeing that all counselors are all taken up - "

"I'm a counselor," I said, with more assurance than I felt.

She stopped yelling and turned, eyebrows raised. "Who are you?"

"I'm Hinata Hyuuga. I'll be helping out today – "

"Wait," said Ino. "I can't hear you. Say that again?"

"I'm Hinata. I'm supposed to – "

"Wait. _What_? Repeat that?"

"I. Am. Hinata. Hyuuga. I will – "

"You're trying to tell me that you're_ Hinata Hyuuga_ who was at the same boarding school?"

"Yes – "

"The same Hinata who I was so damn jealous of because she spent every waking moment with Sasuke Uchiha?"

"Um – "

"And the infamous girl who walked out of boarding school before graduating and became an actress?"

"Yes," I said miserably, and hung my head.

"So it _was_ you. Well," said Ino. "I want to ask you this."

"Yes?"

"How much did getting one of those official makeovers cost?"

_What?_ I thought, but before I could process thought into language she had placed a firm hand to the last camper in line and had pressed him out the door. Without turning back, she said, "You have your work cut out for you."

I had to wait a moment before responding. I wanted to be friends with her; I didn't want to respond with complete acquiescence.

"Yes," I said simply. "I know."

"And a lot of Sasuke fangirls who are ready to claw your eyes out."

"Oh," I said. Then, "Why?"

"Well, first of all," said Ino, and she slowed down slightly so I could walk in the same step with her, "you spent _time_ with him four years ago."

"That – "

"Second of all, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you were _in love_ with him."

"Not – "

"And third of all, everyone says you broke his heart." She looked me straight in the eyes with her clear blue ones. They were not admonishing or overly curious but expectant, as if she'd seen the whole thing with her very eyes and formed her own opinions of the matter and she was waiting for me to concur with her.

"I don't know," I said helplessly.

"Well, those fangirls are right," Ino said briskly. She sped up to drag a little boy back into line – he'd been trying to squish a bug – and instead of returning in line with me she walked backwards with her hands behind her back.

She was really very graceful. I wonder if she'd still been practicing ballet.

"Those fangirls," said she candidly, "witnessed the fall of an empire such had not been seen since the Fall of Rome."

"…empire?"

"Empire Sasuke," she explained. "Those fangirls were right, you know. I think he _did_ experience…heartbreak, if you will."

"I – "

"He locked himself in his house for several days after a certain girl left," continued Ino. I knew she wasn't trying to be ruthless. However, her words were; they cut to the bone and I felt the imaginary wounds reopening.

"And how did the fangirls react?" I said, changing the course of the conversation. I wished time could be fast-forwarded a few minutes at the very least.

"Well, if you must," she said, "I was one of them. Just as his world – empire – tumbled, ours did too. It just wasn't _good_, to see him like that. All boarded up in his house and isolated."

"Look – that must be a mistake. Maybe he was away for two days."

"Maybe," said Ino, and she turned back around to resume the normal direction of walking, "he wasn't. Maybe he was, oh I don't know, _heartbroken_."

"He wasn't heartbroken!" I said, and irritation crept into my voice. Annoyance had overridden the sudden feelings of anguish because I had forced it to; I wasn't ready to deal with the relationship with him right now. "I knew him explicitly well – " Now did you? asked the maudlin little voice in my head – " – and we weren't like that." _I think_, I added silently, in a subdued thought.

"Well, if you knew him 'explicitly well,'" said Ino in a knowledgeable voice, "then how come you're nervous about using his name?"

"What?" I retorted, only because it was true and "what" was the universal defense of denial. I hoped she would buy that. "I don't use - what? Sasuke? I just used his name - see? Sasuke. Sasuke." Yet my heart suddenly began beating with the mentions and final admittance that _yes_, he did exist; yes, I was acknowledging him, finally, after all these years of either ignorance or denial.

She was better at seeing me through, however, than I thought. Because acting was not an innate process for me and came only through conscious thought, I did not think to act being "fine" with saying his name. And because of that my blunder must have shone through.

"You are nervous," confirmed Ino succinctly.

"I said I wasn't," my voice protested. But I had already lost the battle.

"Dear," she said, and she slowed to a stop as we reached the outcrop of low bedrock. "I am not a fangirl anymore. Am just saying. I will not deem it a felony if you admit that you feel uncomfortable when we're talking about him." She gazed at me intently. "I just think it's slightly interesting."

"Interesting?" I repeated, but before I'd received a response she was yelling directions at the campers and she was pulling ropes from a crate that Rock Lee had brought. I reached in as well and doled out ropes to the campers accordingly.

Oh well. It was easier when Ino herself wasn't interested in pursuing the subject. At least I knew I wasn't.

But before I could completely finish tying the ropes on the carabiners - a task I hadn't found useful since fifth grade rope climbing - someone brushed my shoulders.

"If you thought I'd forget so easily," grinned Ino on her way of securing the ropes of her sixth camper, "you're wrong."

--

--

When I'd finished the ordeal of tying ropes, spotting children, enduring Ino's earsplitting warnings and shrieks and Rock Lee's effervescent bubbling enthusiasm (which wasn't so bad comparing himself to Maito Gai, whom I'd heard was a lot worse) - after all that, I was physically exhausted.

Inwardly I was mentally awake, bright and excited, feeling like I had never before felt, at least not a feeling I remembered; I couldn't pinpoint a moment feeling like _this_. Suddenly I knew how my old classmates had stayed together. It certainly wasn't through the confines of school. They did things like this together; maintained camps. Most likely they had had sleepovers and deep heart-to-heart talks, did things that fed the soul and continued the bonds of friendship.

Laughing with Ino and Rock Lee, I thought I finally saw a little into the vestiges of true friendship.

And the children were not that bad. Even campers who had been dumped at this camp because of busily working parents during the summer were not that bad.

I could weather them - I had weathered acting. And rock climbing was blissful paradise compared to leading in a play in which its emotions I did not feel.

When the first activity and lunch were over, I returned to the lodge, where only a few green-shirted counselors were walking around or sitting down, consulting their notes for what was next. The campers were outside finishing lunch and getting into lines. I could hear their shouts from outside; bright noises of sweetness and sunshine. _Oh_, to be a kid again.

The clock was set above the huge fireplace that was only used during Christmas and New Year's. Ino had told me that long ago, the camp founder nearly had had a fit when his assistant had suggested putting a clock in the lodge.

It was a natural place, claimed the irate camp founder, a place without the stresses of modern life.

However, when he had retired the remaining leaders had enough sense in them to at least put up a small indicator of time - the lodge was such a busy middle meeting ground of everyone and the culmination of activities, with_out_ a clock it would be chaos like it had been so far.

So, Ino told me, they finally _made_ a clock - one with twigs and bits of used metal where otherwise fine, industrialized steel workings took place. The numbers weren't there, just dashes made by a particularly sharp twig. Of course they'd needed the mechanical workings from a real clock - they weren't quite advanced enough to make the inner workings from scratch - but nevertheless the external of the clock was completely "naturalized", and above the fireplace it didn't look like the "modern world" at all, having an outside made of leaves and wood.

I looked at this clock now, and although the clock itself wasn't stressful, the feeling that plummeted into my stomach was.

Five more minutes saw me leading campers to the second activity, kite-flying.

Five more minutes also saw Sasuke doing the same thing.

Maybe, I thought with a twisted feeling of hope, he was sick. Sick a few hours ago due to stomach cramping - (_wait_ that didn't sound right, he wasn't a girl) - or maybe salmonella poisoning; hey, that could happen to anyone - or maybe there was a Very Important Family Emergency Meeting to attend to and precipitously he'd left, being absent for the second activity.

"Maybe," I voiced aloud hopefully, "he fell and needs stitches because he fell on his head and broke his brain."

"Who," said a voice," are you talking about?"

I turned around and saw Karin, and laughed a laugh designed to laugh away what I'd just said. "Ahaha, nothing, really."

"Sasuke, right?" she said rather with an air of a long suffering doctor who'd seen it all. "Ino told me, you know. She tends to tell everybody these things. Did she tell you about her theory of Empire Sasuke and His Falling?"

"Yes," I admitted, then, abashedly, "Because of me."

"Don't listen to her," said Karin more sharply. Now she had the air of a psychiatrist with a self-destructing patient who was repeatedly banging his head against a wall. "It's just a theory, you know. Like the theory of evolution."

"And look how true that is."

"Ah, who knows. I'll give you a better example - the theory how people think acai berries help in lowering weight."

"Um," I said. "Okay."

Karin took on a more serious look. "Hinata," she said. "It's not fair to you if you keep bashing yourself this way. Maybe it's all these reminders of the past and the things you committed then. I take it that Ino's not helping, either."

"She says that she's not a fangirl anymore, though," I said miserably.

"Once a fangirl, always a fangirl," Karin quoted wisely, though I was pretty sure the original words had been "once a cheater, always a cheater." Or liar. Or thief. "She's still upset on Sasuke's behalf. Perhaps you ought to stop thinking about their feelings and think about yours. _You_ need to give yourself time to heal, too."

"It's just so hard," I said desperately, relaying so little of the emotions I found I must deal with.

"Ah," said Karin. "But tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it."

"Pardon?"

"My favorite Lucy Maud Montgomery quote." She leapt up from the bench and pretended to sing into her scarf. "_Tomorrow is always freshhh_," she told me in a sing-song voice. _"With no mistakes in it_."

"Thank you," I muttered, but I laughed. She seemed always so cheerful and in tune with her life. A sad friend who needed cheering up? Done.

"You'll be fine," she said. But on my behalf her face seemed to grow a little worried. Her voice wove down to a whisper. "When do you see him again? I mean when do you work with him?"

"You know," I said, once again miserable. "In, like, half a minute."

She grew quiet.

"We're in kite-flying together," I continued monotonously. "With, I think, Shikamaru."

At his name she perked up. "Ah, Shika," she said, her voice taking on a wise quality. I raised my eyebrows. "Shikamaru," she said in a more confident whisper, "if one of those souls who truly understand the recesses and crevices of nature and the universe and the rustic qualities of the human being."

"Do _you_ understand?" I said.

"Well, no," Karin said matter-of-factly. "But I'm pretty sure he does. I mean he is a walking prodigy. By age twelve he'd made his own computer program."

"Really?" I wondered, my interest piqued. To think I'd been at boarding school with him all those times and never thought twice about his better-than-average test scores. I didn't convey this to Karin, however. "Why?"

"Why I mentioned it? Because he'll get what's happened between you and Sasuke."

"You mean he's experienced in the field of..." Love seemed to rigid a word, too passionate; "...affection?"

"Well, yes, there is that. But once he sees the awkward position and awkward looks you two might share, he'll just _get_ it. He'll help you, I promise."

"Help me what?" By this time my voice had taken a near-panic quality to it. We were the only two counselors left, and outside I heard Ino shouting for the campers to get into line. My feet started to shake into movement.

"Help you...cope." She paused. "Well, not really _cope_. Just _get by_ the whole thing. Don't worry, Hinata! If there's a middle man there's no one you should pick more than Shikamaru Nara."

"Are you su - "

But I never got the words out, because the door of the lodge had opened and someone had stepped in, effectively cutting into our muted conversation.

It was Sasuke.

The air particles seemed to freeze in a _whoosh_, creating an expanse of solid air between us, molding our bodies and everything around us into something like clay figurines. My feet stopped trembling; my mouth, stuck between a word, was left slightly open. And my eyes stared at something above his left ear. I couldn't seem to look into his eyes.

Maybe he was looking directly, straight-on, at me. If he was I didn't see it, didn't want to.

Maybe he wasn't affected at our confrontation. And for him, his voice box continued to work, as if it was well-oiled and never had met a hitch in its making as mine did, always.

He was so sure of himself.

"You're needed," he said very pithily. I didn't need to point at myself and mouth _who, me?_ I didn't need to raise my eyebrows at recognition. I was very simply, very straightforwardly, part of the furniture, a totem pole, it seemed, made of wood and maybe with a little added-on decoration to look like a human.

He turned and opened the door and let it clang shut after him.

I was astonished the day didn't end and give way to night; the coldness would have been complete.

"Go on," urged Karin.

"Don't say," I warned her, and maybe warning myself, too, for the notion of hoping too optimistically, "that it will get better." I was backing away now, walking a little backwards, a little like a drunken man who didn't know his bearings. "Because I know it won't."

"Hinata," Karin said. "Wait. It - "

"It won't," I said, breathing very fast. "It won't."

I opened the door and let it clang shut too, and let my wooden legs walk to the dark-haired man who stood in front of a line of waiting campers.

* * *

**(I just read _Someone Like You _and _That_ _Summer_ by Sarah Dessen so the tone of this chapter might have been a little depressed)**

**Thanks for loving me enough to read - I really, really appreciate it and it makes my little writing world a brighter place.**

**And for those of you who love enough to review - I hope you don't mind tackle-hugs-that-might-break-a-bone-or-two :), because I want to hug you all! **

**And also, note for my readers of other fanfics:**

**After ACM, I'll be starting up again either The Journal or Spring in My Heart.**

**...and is all :) -h.h**

**Wait! **

**P.S. _Por favor_ and _s'il vous plait, _vote on my poll :) It's very important to me.**


	10. Kiteflying

yashi14: I guess Hinata didn't have to fear her major problems, (after reading this chapter). And this chapter isn't as depressing as the last one, though first apperances may say otherwise. Thanks for the review!

zabobinator: Wow, you just read I am Hinata Hyuuga? Yes, it was angsty, haha. I wonder if my writing's improved? :)

tiny . coco . chan (with spaces because of the document cutting stuff out): Thank you. I can't review like you do; I can't seem to mull over everything I've read; I just am left speechless, usually, after reading a fanfic chapter, and just want the author to update more. Thank you for giving me that "mulling over", reflecting about the chapter. Yeah, maybe Ino _will_ try to "get between" Sasuke and Hina?? I wonder. I mean nothing is left out etched in stone yet (for example, I have no idea what I'm going to write after this chapter) so I don't know yet. Haha, I think I learned about the Roman Empire last year in English reading Julius Caesar so it's nice to know I still retain a little of the knowledge of freshman year. And I hope that Sasuke's not a block of ice in this chapter. He isn't; actually. He's actually a human being, not the cliche I'd set him up to be in I am H.H. And as for your wondering (that's proper grammar, by the way!) about how the kite goes, I guess you have your answer :)

--

--

**Chapter 8  
Kite-Flying**

…I climbed a mountain and I turned around  
and I saw my reflection  
in the snow-covered hill  
(where the land dips broadly down…)  
Oh, mirror in the sky,  
what is love?  
**-Landslide**  
The Dixie Chicks, Fleetwood Mac

* * *

--

--

I was terrified of small places with all four walls encircling me and low-built ceilings and floors that seemed to tilt upwards in such a way that you thought you were going to be swallowed.

The open spaces were worse.

As I stood there with a limp kite, battered from years of high-flying and looking like all the will to fight was beat out of it by the wind, I felt the air pressure circle around me. They trapped me the way even a tight, cramped room couldn't.

I was standing on top of the tallest hill around as far as the eye could see. Later I would find out, from Shikamaru, that the camp was built in that particular area for the purpose of that hill. In the rural areas, steep land was rare, and the camp was lucky to have been the one so quickly to claim it.

But overlooking the hill, the deep lush grasses skated precipitously downwards toward the deep gorge of a valley. A ravine; a bottomless chasm, it seemed. From my impossibly high vantage point I could not see the bottom of the valley. I imagined that whoever stood on the bottom – if there was a bottom – must squint upwards to see my tiny figure.

Kite-flying was something ephemeral, transient; not for people like me, people who'd spent most of their lives in stucco buildings – primary then secondary school, college then work. Kite-flying was not for the weak-eyed people after hours of working on the computer – was not for those who were shut in from the sunlight for days at a time, reading or writing or practicing lines.

Kite-flying was for the living, the _fitnessed_, and Hanabi would say I be damned if I said kite-flying was my thing.

It was something in the air, I thought; but then again, isn't it always? Something about how the air seemed so…compressed yet loose up here, how it seemed to pack you in yet set your muscles alert and hypersensitive. Something about that hill set your nerves tingling and your eyes wide open and your sight more acute.

Standing there, I knew I wasn't that high up. But it certainly, I reflected, felt like it, staring down.

Finally I turned around and faced the eager mass of campers. There were ten in my line, horizontally stretched out to cover nearly half the hilltop.

"Well," I said, quavering, "I suppose I'm ready to go."

"Just remember," said a voice quietly, pretty far beneath me, "As you run, run with your back to the wind."

It was a little boy who had spoken, a little boy with shaggy black hair and dark thin wire-rimmed glasses. His name was Ruu.

"Just remember yourself," I said right back, smiling in spite of myself. "Shikamaru sent you, didn't he?" Ruu wasn't part of my camper line.

He didn't say anything in answer to the question, though he did offer me a second tip. "Reel out enough line for enough altitude," he said, repeating the words Shikamaru had, no doubt, told him to repeat; "That will enable the kite to stay aloft."

"Thanks," I told him, grinning, "but no thanks." Too bad he didn't know that I was busy repeating those words in my head right now, so fast that the words were overlapping in my vigor. "I can do it myself! You have faith, too, right? And so does Shikamaru."

"Actually," said Ruu, wrinkling his nose, "Shi-ma-ka-ru said that – "

"Oh, it's okay, I don't want to – "

" – you'll need a lot more than faith or luck to get out of this one."

Ruu's eyes blinked owlishly behind his glasses as I considered acting out an exaggerated scene of getting furious at Shikamaru and then storming off into the lodge again, where I was safely away from wide open spaces and a tendency to hurt myself. I mean, if acting worked and the shoe fit, why not? But I told myself to stop chickening out.

"Tell him I said thanks, then," I said to Ruu, and at the same time I was steeling myself inside. "Really. Tell him all his tips have been good. Especially when I end up in the ravine."

"What's that supposed to mean?" the little boy had asked, but he was moving away already, to where his dictator was sitting, underneath a cool tree. Beside him, enveloped in shadows, sat Sasuke, looking down at nothing in particular. I couldn't see, anyway; I was too far away and the sun was casting lights across my eyes.

I turned back to the open grasses before me and finally cast my kite out into the air. _Run with your back to the wind_, I thought. Whatever the hell that meant.

"Oh well, then," I said to the campers behind me. "Follow after me, and here goes nothing."

Fear began to palpitate through me – the sort of fear that was more exhilaration than pure terror. I'd learned something about it in science – adrenaline and noradrenalin and so on – and these facts pounded haphazardly through my head as I began to run, one step at a time then so many that I lost count and the world through my eyes became stilted and up and down and rushing –

– and the air was brushing past my face as if it was a smooth worn stone and the air was water and I suddenly understood the thrill of sky-diving – all right, so this was _kite-flying_, but really, the rush was all the same thing –

The sensation felt wonderful. Without second care in the world I let loose my kite as if I'd known how to do it from the moment I was born and suddenly, everything felt so _right_, as if everything was going to work out right and justly like listening to a song or watching a movie and knowing that the ending was going to end on a happy note or a happily-ever-after.

I let the kite go, and it swirled through my fingertips and into the sifting air, and I swear that right then I could feel the singular air particles brushing past my face. The moment was fleeting, yet in that instant I felt whole and warm and full of _soul_ and it was as if my soul itself was repairing and being reborn, the butterfly out of the chrysalis.

It was all so beautiful that I wanted to cry. I wanted to capture that moment forever.

Then my feet hit a tumble of rocks, and I don't know what happened, my legs just kept going and my body plummeted several feet down into the chasm of rocks and the air wasn't so beautiful anymore, it was just rushing meaninglessly, screaming past my ears, yet I couldn't hear anything; the sense of touch was too overbearing.

I felt the rocks cut in deep, deep, deep, and I bit my lip just as deeply as the rocks had cut into my skin because damnit, I was _not_ going to cry. Hinata Hyuuga was not going to cry. She had built up her life after its nadir and after all those years and god_damnit_, a fall like this wasn't going to let loose her lachrymal ducts.

But it did. My feet had connected with the bottom of the ravine that I couldn't see up there, and they connected only because the opening of the gorge seemed miles above my head. I'd fell, and I'll fell badly: in such a way that I'd slid straight down despite all the slabs of rock that had jutted out. I knew the rock that pushed into my left shoulder was drawing blood; I'd felt the stickiness.

"Hyuuga!"

I forced my voice out but it didn't come. I swallowed a few times; my throat was too dry. At last I managed to yell something convincing that sounded like "What?"

"I've been calling your name for the past five minutes," said Shikamaru, carefully testing the rock ledges as he finally jumped down to where I sat bent. "Are you okay?"

I hadn't known I'd been dreading those words, but at them I knew I hadn't known what to answer. "Y-yes," I said, because I didn't know what else to say. That every inch of my body seemed to be on fire, hurting, smarting?

"That's good," he said. "It's been at least two weeks since this has happened to anyone here. I myself fell down here at least twice from the beginning of summer," he told me. "It's not a big deal. Just as long as you're okay."

At least Shikamaru was here, I thought; he was someone who could guide me at least a little. Karin had been right in saying that he could make the situation more bearable, if only by his nonchalant, easy attitude and his knowledge of virtually everything.

"I'm okay," I lied.

"Ego bruised but intact?"

"Yes."

"Come on." He helped me to my feet. "At least you know not to careen down this hill again, Hyuuga."

At least my tears weren't prominent, I thought with a touch of gratitude. To what, I don't know. Just the fact that I was slightly spared some worrying over, slightly spared some dignity. Strangely enough I didn't feel too humiliated, too flustered about the fall.

The moment had surely been worth it.

--

--

Shikamaru held at bay my campers, most of them who had ran a few yards and looked at their kite instead of being caught up in the exhilarated feeling. I was told – by Ruu – where the nurse's office was; two cabins left from the water fountain.

I walked now, half-staggering, upwards and above the crest of the hill and reaching flat land. I must have been thinking about something else or too preoccupied in my thoughts because before I knew it I was walking to where the campgrounds where, but I was cutting a straight path and passing through the shadow of the tree where Sasuke sat stolidly.

He must have been not five yards away when I realized that the grass seemed somehow shadier than it had been, and then I started and looked around and I saw him, staring back.

I told myself to shut up, but nothing I told myself mattered much – to myself, anyhow, ironically – and my mouth was off, flapping like a snapping turtle. Stupid, I told myself. Stupid.

"Why aren't you…with the kids?"

"Can't," he said to me, and just like that, we were holding conversation, little bits of talk and personality. "I was told…to sit here. By Nara. He said you needed to take my place, learn the ropes."

"Learn the ropes," I laughed a little. "I guess I did."

"Why are you coming back?" His eyes were intense. It was as if his words had a double meaning to them. Just as easily he could have been referring to how I came back from the long years of being away. My words stumbled a bit in response to it.

"W-what – oh – I – I slipped. Fell. In the…ravine."

For a moment his eyes simply searched my face, my expression. I felt vulnerable; exposed, like the naïve fifteen-year-old girl from back then.

Then he began to laugh. "Figures," he said, then continued to laugh. His was a strange laugh, seemingly designed to please specifically me. Of course it wasn't – I of all people knew that – but I couldn't help feeling that every nuance, every hitch in his laughter matched me, some strange way. I was thinking about all this that I forgot to be angry for his laughter in the first place.

"What do you mean?" I asked him, half-wondering in my dreamland.

"You weren't completely balanced back then, either," he said.

And then it was as if all the anger I'd either forgotten or misplaced came rushing back to me – and I tried not to let it out – I even heard myself tell myself _what the hell, Hinata? After all this time it's he who should be furious at you_ – but I didn't heed it, I was too busy lashing out.

"What do you _mean_ I wasn't completely balanced back then, I was _completely_ balanced, mentally and physically, and if you say it wasn't true you're either lying or being desperately stupid like how I acted by leaving you – " Good God, this wasn't coming out right; I'd meant for a serious apology, like the way they did in movies with formal candlelit ceremonies or a note or a letter; not a verbal fit. " – and I didn't fall into the ravine by accident, it was completely by purpose; that's right, I completely _meant_ to fall into that ravine, consequences and balance be damned, so if you think that…"

My steam had petered out and I was staring at the ground waspishly, irately.

"So," said Sasuke at long last, "you _meant_ to fall into that ravine."

The words sounded even dumber in his voice. It wasn't scathing, but to my ears it was mighty close to it.

"Yes," I said, and from that affirmative I had to go on and do every stupid acting-thing; I projected my voice and made eye contact and planted my feet to "maintain a firm position" and all the things that my manager would've loved; "I did," I declared. "I confess, I did."

What a line! If all I could do was to pull it back in my strange thoughts, where it belonged, I would do that. But even controlling my voice was out of my power. I simply waited, miserably, for his reaction to mine. For every reaction there was an equal and opposite reaction, after all.

"You're hysterical," Sasuke told me, and whether it was the hysterical that turned into tantrums or the hysterical that meant I was being really funny, it did nothing for my poise.

"I did, though," I breathed. "I meant to fall in." What I said suddenly didn't matter anymore. The Hinata Empire was already crushed to smithereens, far faster than any Sasuke Empire had time to tumble

"So you meant," he clarified, like he always did, where the meaning of the words always, always sounded lesser in his sure voice, "that you meant to go off and sustain bruises and cuts that are still bleeding."

My elbow was tingling with the little trickles of blood that were running down from my forearm. "Yes," I confirmed, lied.

"And you meant," he said, "to cry and leave your eyes and face a mess."

I knew I blanched visibly, making my "mess" of a face even more unattractive. I couldn't help it. "Yes," I said, flushing. "I guess I did."

"Go on and clean up," he said, in a gentle voice I thought he wasn't capable of producing. "The nurse's office is – "

"Two cabins left from the water fountain," I rushed on, wanting to get out of _this_, this situation, this scene.

"Well, yes," confirmed Sasuke. "But do you know where the water fountain is?"

"I…no," I admitted.

"Two cabins right," he said, "from the nurse's office."

And he seemed to find this absurdly funny, I think, because his mouth twitched and a corner of it went up. He didn't even put up a hand to cover it. He just looked at me with his small joke hanging in the air, the smirk growing on his face.

"You," I told him in my most haughty voice possible, "are hysterical…and furthermore insufferable," I added.

I left the cool shade of the trees and suddenly, with the sunshine newly paving the path for me, I felt much better.

It wasn't just this encounter with this strange, enigmatic boy who I'd thought had hated my guts, who I'd met so many years ago on that fateful day and maybe fell in love a little…

It was that moment, that moment I'd opened up like a butterfly and looked at the world with wide eyes swirling all around me.

It was Ino and Karin and Sakura and Shikamaru and even Ruu, all their encounters with me at the camp, settling aside to allow a little room for me to grow.

It was all of these things and more.

I walked the path of sunshine and followed it to the little stepping stones that let me know I was nearing the camping grounds.

--

--

I exited the nurse's office a little later, where I saw Shikamaru just entering the lodge. Seeing me, he held the door open, and began to conversation from there.

"You seen Sakura?"

"No," I said. I pressed the bandage on my elbow, and then felt the ones on my back with my other hand, feeling twinges. "Why?"

"She volunteers at the nurse's office regularly," Shikamaru said. "She's assistant there. Maybe today she had to go collect herbs or something."

"Maybe," I said.

"Anyway, how are your wounds faring?" He sat down at a table and I followed suit, looking around. It was dinnertime and the lodge was thick with swarming campers and trays of food. "The last time I saw you, you looked pretty hurt."

"I'm okay now."

"I guess you're stronger than I thought you'd be, Hyuuga."

"And why do you call me Hyuuga?" I asked him.

Shikamaru shrugged. Too bad he wasn't as experienced as I was in acting; I could see his fakeness as if plastered in an advertisement above his head.

"_Shikamaru_," I said firmly. "There is a reason for this and I know something."

"What?"

"That you're going to tell me!"

"Ah, fine," he drawled the words out, "but it's nothing of significance."

"I'm sure it's not. I'm just curious, I guess."

"It's just that," Shikamaru shrugged, "Sasuke calls you that."

"He does?" Inside, my mind was repeating, over and over, _He mentions me at all?_ I recalled our exchange a few hours ago – I didn't exactly recalled it as much as it seemed to summon itself into my mind every few seconds or so. My skin tingled.

"Sure he does."

"Why?"

"He talks about you."

"What? What?" My heart began a steep climb. "What does he say?"

"Oh, I'm not authorized to tell," Shikamaru told me. "Just know that he talks about you a lot."

* * *

Oh dear God :) that felt amazing. I swear I'm going to write like this and not look back. I'm just going to write...not first plan and write down the scenes I want to write and trudge through the ones I could care less about.

It felt good, is all. Maybe after a day or two I'll read back and realize how bad this chapter really is, but actually right now I feel quite good. I can honestly say this is my favorite chapter so far. It just felt right. I was listening to Landslide by Fleetwood Mac and Savin' Me by Nickelback when I wrote this...

Rather rambling now.

Am out :)  
-h.h.


	11. Coxcomb Plant

To my pulchritudinous (haha, there's a word you don't see every day) reviewers;

_thank you so much._

**ImCutePoison**: Props to you for reading it in one breath! That's an undertaking. I want them to come together, too, haha!

**chocoGONEsushi**: Hey, you're back, too ;) Thanks for being my reviewer once more. It's just like olden times.

**tiny**.**coco**.**chan**: You liked the description of the ravine? Yayz! I usually think that my description is not up to par. It's difficult to not sound cliche when describing something, especially dialogue or another person. I love that Sasuke changed, too. One of the best things as an author is that even when your previous chapters sucked, you can still see your characters changing. Maybe they change as the author changes? :)

**zabobinator**: Yes, I agree! - that I am Hinata Hyuuga was incredibly rushed. I think I wanted a million things to happen...a million cliche things, that is, in that story. Thank you so much for saying my writing has improved.

**FullStop**: Eep, the directions he gave her _were_ pretty funny. I wrote them on a whim. Thanks!

**RunningBarefootAtMidnight**: _Thank_ you for your vote of confidence, so much. Heehee, I like how he says her last name, too.

* * *

Goodbye to You ~ Michelle Branch

goodbye to you,  
goodbye to everything I thought I knew...  
you were the one I lo-oved,  
the one thing that I tried to hold on to...

* * *

--

**Chapter 9**

**Coxcomb Plant**

**--**

_Nighttime_

I jumped from the last step almost like a child, and opened my mouth, clean as a cat's, and yawned. The air itself, soft to the touch, clung to my hair and skin like silk.

The clouds were low hanging and bulging with condensation and the moon was shying away in the haze, but it was beautiful. It was beautiful, and secretive, and I breathed a part of the magic in and I closed my eyes and I must have smiled. I believe I smiled.

_Capture your own happiness, Hinata. Please capture your own happiness._

_--_

_--_

_next morning_

"Good job," I beamed at Sakura.

"Thank you," she returned, a mite noncommittally. Agilely she pushed her paddle and executed a swift hit to the left. "You're not too bad yourself."

All around us were the noises of delirious campers – delirious about being outside, delirious about playing paddleball. Me, this was my first time playing. So far it had wielded a total of the following: a bruised wrist, several cringing mortifying moments, and results rather far from excellent. It was all too fast and coordinated for me.

But the campers loved it; they were having the times of their lives. I was lucky because I got to see Ruu cutely challenge a girl to playing a game, with the two bickering continuously. Ruu won. Little kids.

My – Sakura and mine – opponent, though, was Kiba, and he was trying hard. Trying hard for show (bark) rather than actual skill (bite). All his strokes were performed with such complexity; with twists and long, drawn-out swings and a few loud yells for good effect. I found it very amusing when he, in due course, got hit full in the face. He was trying for one of the more garish moves – spinning the ball counter-clockwise with a sharp flick of the wrist – and he wound up missing entirely, the ball ricocheting off his face.

"Ouch," I wished on his behalf.

"I'm fine!" said Kiba hastily, and he pulled his hand away. A medium-sized bump emerged where he had been hit.

"Ouch," I said again.

Sakura took charge. "Why don't you – here," she said, handing me her paddle. She motioned to Kiba. "Come to the bench. I'll get you some salve."

He muttered something akin to thanks but with more tone of an embarrassed, trampled-on ego. He was like a dog himself, tail between legs. What they say about owners turning into their pets, and pets into owners, it's true.

Left sans partner and opponent, I wandered off after placing the paddle in the hanger off the net. I wandered into a little alcove of tree – about thirty trees were planted near the entrance of the park; otherwise the land was bare and sandy.

The sun was hot. I sat on a little mesh where moss and swirls of fern had grown. It was all rather peaceful – shadows slanting off my face and hands, creating bands of black against colors – until a skittering noise alerted me.

I looked up; then down, to the right, and saw an enormous, hairy spider crawling under my leg. I swore it could tell which best way to frighten to crap out of me – it lifted two ghastly legs and made as if to bound up onto my calves. I screamed all the way to high heaven and pushed off the ground as if it had turned into a burning coal, and I leapt up, scattering leaves and lichen and moss. The spider's million gimlet eyes, like endless beads or eggs, stared at me.

Pumped with adrenaline, I flew out of the forest as if there were hunting dogs snapping at my heels.

It seemed so logical right then to shout, give warning; "Spider! There's a spider running amok in the forest!"

It was to my great credit I didn't. Later I'd be heartened to know this, at least, I did not do. It would shred away the last fabric of dignity I held.

The campers who were bird-watching were closest to the forest, though only one or two saw me. A little girl with a small snub nose, huge eyes, and floppy twin ponytails gaped.

"You screamed," she said, wide-eyed.

"Shh," I said, inwardly grinning at my blunders. Self-deprecation. Outwardly, I maintained a grim face. "It was me, but don't tell!"

"Oh – okay," she agreed immediately. Like most little kids she could forget easily. She was obviously not one of the few little kids who, on the other hand, remembered everything and brought things up at the most inopportune times.

"What's your name?" I said to her, bending down.

"Keito. It means coxcomb plant. What's…yours?"

"Hinata. It means sun."

"I like that name," she said wistfully. "Maybe I should change mine."

I laughed at her naivety. Laughed, maybe, a little at her innocence. My laughter felt a little wistful itself.

"Thanks," I said. "I like Keito, too."

She wrinkled her nose. "Coxcomb is a weed!"

"It's still beautiful," I told her. "My sun will nurture it and make it grow."

--

"I hate it most," Karin declared, "when people say, 'It's all good.'"

We were sitting at a corner table in the lodge after dinner, and she was cleaning off the lens of her horn-rimmed glasses with her lime-green woolen sweatshirt. "Because, _au contraire, madam_, it is _not_ all good. It is quite _bad_. The world will end in 2012 due to poverty and rape and suchlike."

"You're even more pessimistic than me in that issue," I laughed. "The apocalypse is so _not_ going to come around in a mere two years."

She huffed ruefully. "Well, still. There's not much more you can hate than the bland, stupid words of, 'It's all good.'" She peered myopically at her glasses before putting them back on. She was really very pretty even with them on. "So what do _you_ hate, Hinata? Think twice before answering!"

What I hated…

I could have mentioned several things on the spot: long lines, people who said things they didn't mean (Hikaru, former manager), people who boasted, snow, rain, sleet, hail…

…but most of all I hated regrets. I hated being so rude to people when I was younger, as if I had the world cradled in the palm of my hand and I could crush it on whim; I hated…I hated leaving Konoha.

But I did not express this aloud. Maybe because I was afraid Karin would reply, "Maybe you shouldn't have walked out of Konoha, then, without a second glance." I was afraid of all that.

That was why I replied with a concise, "I hate acting when I'm forced to."

I heard footsteps before I heard his voice; "I remember that," he said.

Without turning around or movement of any kind I felt my heart jump in my throat.

"Sasuke!" I heard Karin speak. "What a pleasant surprise. Come and sit down."

He did so; on the other side of me. Imperceptibly Karin, on the other side of me, pushed closer so it was uncomfortable, forcing me to move away, more to Sasuke's side.

Subtle, she is. Lovely person, she is not.

"Yeah…acting," I said, not quite making eye contact. "I don't really do that now."

"If I remember correctly you were acting to be Neji," he said. I could feel his eyes boring into mine. Or maybe it just felt like it because we were sitting so close. Like every girl I worried about how I looked…up close. Ugh, I thought. Awkward. Too much so.

"Yes," I agreed, biting my lip. "You hated me back then." Left unsaid was the similar statement, 'You hate me now, too.'

"No," he contradicted. "I don't hate you now, and I didn't hate you back then, either."

"So you didn't?" I said. "Good!" I stared at some twenty feet away, willing the walls to crash down around us to end this misery of mine.

"I was wondering, though," he said, almost gently, "if it's the other way around."

He thought I hated him. I could not have been more surprised if he had said, "Quite the opposite," instead, of hating me.

"I couldn't hate you," I said, and then I looked at him, which was stupid.

"That's right, dear Sasuke," said Karin's voice, floating on my other side. "Who could hate a wee bittle lovable thing like you?"

"Shut up," he said.

Karin had the audacity to look injured. Of course it was easier to look at her, or anything else, than his eyes. "Ack," she said. "The Bachelor of the Year has told me to shut my trap."

"And again," said Sasuke in a mock-pleasing tone. "Shut up."

Karin told me, "He's not usually like this. It's only because I decreased his ego with that lovable comment. Otherwise he couldn't say shut up to anyone."

"Karin – " said Sasuke. "I'm warning you – "

"Nah, he's more the type to send eye daggers, or actually have a dagger and kill that person. I mean, he's just not a verbal person, you know?" She jumped up and danced away from the table before he could retort with something else, and she glided to another table, lips grinning.

We were left in silence, of course, and before I could think of something profitless to say – how's the weather? or, what did you, perchance, have for breakfast this morning?, he had asked me, "Is it true?"

"Is what true?" My voice was faintly uneasy.

"That you do not hate me."

"Of course I don't hate you," I said automatically. "What on earth for? It's obviously more likely you would hate me; I was a bitch back then."

Saying a curse word made it seem more real. Suddenly I seemed to have more courage, by facing up to it. I was, though. It was all too true.

"You may have been," he acknowledged. "I don't think I was much better."

"But you don't understand," I said. Making eye contact seemed easy now, because this point was imperative to make. From the moment I had set foot into this camp, Arisa Voce had never crossed my conscious mind. It was like I was attempting to erase her, that part of me. It was exactly like the time when I _was_ Arisa Voce and I was trying to forget the Hinata before that, the Hinata of Konoha boarding school.

And look how well that denial had turned out.

I needed to face the past, acknowledge it.

"You don't understand," I repeated. "I…I was Arisa Voce."

* * *

**If you don't remember**, Hinata met Sasuke when she was acting as Arisa Voce. It was in the middle of a party, and it seemed like he didn't recognize her due to her changes as an actress.

Though this chapter may not have been the most interesting, it _does _represents an important milestone. She meets Keito, whom I designed as sort of a "mini-Hinata," a Hinata portrayed when she was younger and more naïve. You'll see more of Keito and Ruu, heehee.

Can I burden you with another favor? If you haven't voted on my poll, please do. Hint: it's not just in fiction...

I love you love you love you :),  
LuLu


	12. Heart to Heart Talk

**reviewer's corner**

chocolocopockylovesyou: Thank you. Expecting, as in, SasuHina? Heehee. Am incredibly grateful you are back.

RunningBarefootatMidnight: Eee, thank you! I think I did duly tell you this before, but I'll say it again: I lurve your username. I'd change mine, but I'm too deeply rooted now.

ImCutePoison: Thanks! Yes, SasuHina is the way to go :) Also I'm sort of curious as to your username?

FeatherBerry: You read it all in one sitting? (OMG) I totally understand about reading great fanfics and how I have to know what happens next and all that, but I didn't qualify this story as a great fanfic...lalala. Thank you very much; I do hope my writing's improved. Thanks much!

tiny . coco . chan: Heehee, my OC's I try to make natural, somehow. There was Karu, then Kasumi (from very first chapter of I am H.H.) then some other characters I don't care to remember. I hope to shape Ruu's and Keito's personalities more. And your point about Kiba makes me think that I'll add more of him, too. Ha, it's true what they say about the reviewers writing the fanfic, you really influence my writing.

Ho hum...somehow I managed to update amidst all this Euro AP homework. Eh, homework is still more important, though, is what to keep in mind. And social life ;)

* * *

--

--

**Au Contraire, Madam ~ Chapter 12  
Heart to Heart Talk**

--

--

**I'm** sinking slowly  
So hurry hold me  
Your hand is all I have to keep me hanging on  
Please can you tell me  
So I can finally see  
Where you go when you're** gone**  
_Michelle Branch - All You Wanted_

--

--

_I needed to face the past, acknowledge it._

_"You don't understand," I repeated. "I…I was Arisa Voce."_

--

--

Whenever a certain set of circumstances is held into account, I feel a sourness behind my eyeballs. It can happen when I do not get enough sleep; it can happen when I am on the verge of crying; and it can happen as a premonition that I have done something stupid, maybe even foolhardy, and that it is too late to do anything but to attempt to recover the remains.

It was the last of the three that caused my eyes, now, to throb with pain – with reasons more psychological than physical.

He frowned; a puzzled frown, perhaps, or maybe a frown that signaled a very near blow-up. Close to anger.

Before I said anything more stupid, adding more repugnancy to my character, or before the immediate anger would occur, I had gotten up from the dinner table and I had placed distance between us – quick, hard, cold distance.

"Wait," he said. But I did not. I walked – long, furious strides that belied my inner cringing sense of self, and told myself, relived, that at least this wasn't one of those dreams where you cannot move.

But then, I thought, if this were a dream, then he in real life would never have gotten to know. That I was indeed Arisa Voce, another bland actress, far from a diamond in the rough.

And our friendship might have gotten salvaged.

--

--

But, as usual, I had underestimated the people around me.

Like a panther he caught up, to where I thought I was safe – fifty yards away from the lodge, near a woody alcove. The sky was dimming its lights and I had the notion that I was safe when I felt a hand at the base of my spine and his calm, unhurried voice; that said, simply: "Wait."

"What do you want? What do you need from me?" I said angrily, as if I had the right to be uncaring, the right to be furious.

Immediately ashamed I dropped my façade and turned to face him like a petulant child caught in chaos. He looked very mature, then, very adult-like in his black jacket with a collar, and black pants. Years had added height to his stature and depth to his eyes and cheekbones, and now he looked every bit the young man, just entering the ranks of adulthood, yet wise beyond his years.

I felt disparaged in comparison.

"What on earth are you running for?" he asked me.

I flushed. If there were a mirror I would peer inside to find a mess of a face. Two bulgy, mistrustful eyes rimmed in red, and spots of color on my cheeks. They say actresses – in movies, at least – are pretty, beautiful, even, when they cry. What they say is false.

"I haven't been running," I began. "I was testing my limbs."

"I can see they're working pretty well," he humored me. "You run like a deer out of headlights. Or a bat of hell (whichever you prefer). Fast, maybe, but with a touch of hysteria. I'm not an axe-murderer. I'm not trying to kill you."

"I know you aren't trying to kill me," I said without dignity, breathing fast without pause.

"Then you should have stayed awhile," Sasuke said. "You would learn something important."

"What would I learn?" I asked, feeling so the part of the chastened child I half-expected him to brandish a ruler and slap my palms with it.

"Had you been paying attention," he informed me, "You would have noticed I am not the least bit irate, or surprised."

"At my running away?" I shot back. "I can see why; it's not the first time I've done it – "

"I mean," he said, with a touch of his old impatience," regarding your confession; your being Arisa Voce. The poisonous undertone, no?"

I was speechless.

"Arisa Voce from the party, right?" he asked me. "When I watched one of your famous movies I didn't recognize you, or it didn't hit me, but in person I did."

"I – the party?" I repeated, grabbing at the one thing I could. "You were there…with Karin. We – we shook hands. The party. You remember?" I felt like a poorly educated person fumbling to string sentences together.

But he only smiled. Perhaps one's greatest criticizer is oneself, after all. He did not notice – o r was too kind to notice – my stilted attempts at words.

"I remember," he said. "You left not long after that. And when Naruto announced to all of us counselors afterwards that he'd talked to Arisa Voce – AV – online, I went online to the chat room. You weren't there anymore, though."

I felt a reversal of my world-view, my paradigm. Whatever-color-tinted glasses had become smashed, replaced with a more happy hue.

Having been an actress in a place where people either tried to sell me things or hire me, I had been unlucky in finding a person of real value, real character. And thinking that these upright people were an extinct species, I went along with the act, the managers, and how they acted; spuriously. I had forgotten that real life could construct many more corporeal good people than acting could even attempt to mass-produce.

He was one of these untouched souls. And he did remember. He remembered.

I fumbled again; I fumbled awkwardly to take hold of his and – in both of mine – not to kiss it, perhaps, but to hold it as a sign of gratitude, of gratefulness.

"Thank you," I said to him, humbly, at least humbled. "Thank you."

"Not everyone is as paranoid as you are," he told me. "If I had known you were so worried by my response I would have told you sooner."

"You must think me a dreadful creature," I said. "One who is fake and only skin-deep – an actress, an impersonator, imposter."

"No," he said, shrugging with carelessness. "Karin was no better than you, if you want to go on that route. And I'd say you were more successful than she was."

"But look at us now," I pursued. "Now that I'm in real life I do not know how to act. Karin was much more rooted in real life; she didn't embrace the acting world. I did because I didn't know the real world, or myself. She is confidence and self-actualized and I…I am merely a dog scared of its own shadow." I stopped now, feeling all the more the part of an inexperienced child. He was not looking at me. He was looking away, far away. I followed his line of vision and saw the hill of kite-flying. I thought of the ravine.

"You must think me incredibly gauche," I said, twisting my unkempt hair. "You must think me not worthy of being a counselor, a leader, here. You must think I am not worthy of being leader anywhere." I expected him to regard me with cold eyes, all soft countenance gone, faint surprise now that I had hit the nail on the head. I expected a harsh, sharp laugh; "You are smarter than you look," a sardonic glance down at me, a mocking curling sneer.

He did none of these. He looked at me, instead, and said something, a quality to his voice I had not heard before. Moments later I realized it was anger.

"If you expect all this of me," he said with an edge to his voice, "then you must not know my very well. Has time affected your sense of me? Or have you never actually gotten to know the true yours truly?"

"I _do_ know you," I said. "At least I think that spending half a year as your roommate would account for knowing you."

"Well," he said, "my birthday is July 23th. And I like the color black. That much is obvious. But what about the more important things? Life goals? Things like that."

"Life goals," I echoed, back-pedaling. "For all I know…you want to be a hotel manager."

"A little off," he shot back. "My life goal is to get back at Itachi."

"Your bigger brother?" I asked, visibly startled. "What for? Isn't he the…the basketball manager?"

"Eh," said Sasuke, "Yes. It was over something small when I was a kid. We were playing a game of hide and seek at a posh party. I was It and Itachi was the last person in hiding. I couldn't find him, even after an hour of searching, with all the kids and all the grownups. Then we had to go home, so I shouted, 'I give up!', and he jumped out right behind the coat-stand in the doorway, and scared the daylights out of me."

"A something small?" I laughed. "Yeah, that sure is a small thing. Are you sure you're honestly stewing over that?"

"_Yes_," he enunciated. "It was crippling to my little kid ego. And I'll never forget it…the moment is branded behind my eyes forever."

"Harsh," I told him. "But maybe you'll get back to him someday."

"As is my life goal," he said.

I laughed. Of all the things…his confession made the atmosphere significantly lighter.

"Oh yes," he said. "Before I forget. Are you scared of spiders?"

I visibly blanched. "Spiders? Who told you that?"

"No one," he said, affecting an air of impatience. "But are you? Scared?"

"If no one told you," I said, stepping around the question to the more important piece of information, "then how did you know?"

"A little bird told me."

" – Sasuke…!"

" – or maybe a little scream at the edge of the woods told me," he informed me.

"You heard, didn't you?" I said with bitterness directed at my own stupidity.

"Eh, maybe not in the flesh, but I have my sources." He grinned.

"Creepy," I informed him, then rummage around for something random to change the subject. "So," I ventured. "How old are you?"

"Nineteen," he said. "Turning twenty in a week. Good God, I'm getting old."

"No," I said. "Not old. Never old. You'll look and still sound like a teenager. You're still one inside."

"I hope so," he said, a little distracted, a little preoccupied in his thoughts.

"I know so," I said firmly, then, because this must be depressing the hell out of him, I asked, "What are you majoring in for college?"

"Ah, something or the other," he responded in a perfunctory voice. "For the moment I'm not quite sure between the police force – law enforcement – or military science."

I felt a lump in my throat. Those people in those majors were in the thick of things, in the thick of the action, the crossfire. They were brave ones in society who got killed.

I swallowed. "Why don't you choose a simpler or more average occupation?"I suggested.

He barked out a laugh, surprised, though sure-sounding somehow. Everything he did was sure, deft. He seemed as if he'd never made an error in his life before.

"Since when have I been average?"

"No," I protested, heat flooding my palms. "I didn't mean that."

"Am I really that very average?" he demanded.

"Only on Tuesday afternoons when the sun's not shining," I mumbled, in one of my more strange and funny moments.

He stared. "Well, I guess I'll wait for that Tuesday afternoon…when the sun's not shining," he said finally. "And then when that time comes, I'll prove I'm not average during that time. Deal?"

I smiled. "You do that." But I was still worried about something. "Don't choose such an extreme job," I said, though of course he would not change his mind because of that statement.

"What on earth do you want me to be?"

"I don't know. Anything else. Perhaps – a secretary?"

"Why on earth would I want to be anything akin to secretary?" Sasuke demanded.

"Only that you could – uhm, mail letters and lick stamps and suchlike," I stammered, feeling more and more foolish by the second.

Now he seemed to know that he was about to laugh, because he bit his mouth. Eventually he spoke. "You don't need to worry about me. How about, you run your course, and do what you're good at, and I'll go my way, at what I prefer to do. How about that?"

He was treating me like a pet, like a dog that he expected would run off and chase butterflies after a pat on the head and a "Good dog, Hinata." Indignation rose in my spine.

"What about you don't major in the most dangerous area?" I argued. "You know you're putting yourself in danger, don't you? You should know that very well."

"Eh," he said mildly, deliberately. "I don't care. I don't mind."

"You _should_ mind." My voice was taking on a whiny, breathless quality, and I knew that was because I was close, very close, to anger. "You _should_ mind because people care about you and what you do. You can't just run off and be some officer and go dying in a ditch somewhere."

He waved away my words like a man waves off his pesky dog, or an irate mosquito. "I'll be fine. And I quote: 'You go your way and I'll go mine.' What are you majoring in, anyway? You're not in college, actually – so what are your plans for the future? Acting?"

I snapped, "You know perfectly well that I hated acting."

He grew quiet, thoughtful, digesting my words. I squirmed in my camping boots. Maybe I had talked too fast, let my mouth get before my mind. Maybe I had offended him, somehow, in some way.

"I never knew that."

"Well, I do. And I did."

"Really? I was under the impression that you used acting as a weapon to get what you wanted," Sasuke said.

I winced. "That was a long time ago. I don't know what I was doing back then."

"Maybe so," he said, "but that's a poor excuse that everyone uses. 'That was a long time ago, I'm not like that now, blah blah blah.'"

I knew he was right. I had known that for some time now – that I couldn't just use the past as a barrier, a shield, to contrast myself now. I couldn't say I was some immature teenager in the past because I hadn't _felt_ immature back then. This excuse worked well for people who did not know me well. But for him, it did not work at all.

"Fine," I said, very calmly. A flicker of surprise entered his eyes. "Now you know. That I hated acting. Maybe I'm more like my past self than I think I am. I'm trying to be a better person, though. It's hard! You of all people should know that." Despite myself, my voice took on a bitter edge.

"Maybe I didn't know you as well as I thought, then," he said, almost gently. It hurt.

The trees were rustling all about us and the moonlight was shining so brightly through the trees it appeared to shine right through. The tree branches circled each other, forming an array of shadows that climbed and lengthened and receded.

But all this I did not acknowledge much; I was busy disentangling his words, desperately trying to find some underlying, kinder meaning to it. His words hurt. They hurt a lot. And, as it always did, my brain tried to make up vain excuses that he did not mean what he had just said.

But excuses didn't work now.

"Maybe you didn't," I said heavily, admitting to it.

This would be the perfect time for a salesman-type person to hop in our stilted conversation and go, "Then you guys should know each other better _now_!"

Then I imagined taking a huge yellow hammer and smashing this annoying product of the mind into the ground, into dust. Arrgh.

"What?"

He had been talking.

"I said, I'm going back to my cabin now," Sasuke said. "It's tiring and I want to go to bed."

I guess the day must have tired him out, by staying out pretty late. But I took it that he was tired of our conversation – which I was, too. But then this changed to that he was tired of _me_, and then I talked without thinking; "Maybe you _shouldn't_ talk to me, then, if it's all too tiresome."

His eyes regarded my troubled ones.

And then I was the little dog again, chastised by the mere pull of his eyes, the hint of light in the set of his eyebrows.

"Hinata, I don't mind talking to you," he began, but I cut him off. You're being ridiculous, I told myself. You don't mean this.

"Of course you do," I talked right over him. _"I_ tired of talking to myself."

He leaned back, looking at me. "You're over-thinking things again," he told me. "Have you ever noticed that? That you over-think things much too much? It's one of your more subtle characteristics. But now I've seen it happen over and over again, and I can see the signs that you're over-exerting your thoughts."

"What do you mean?"

"That line, faint as gossamer, that appears between your eyebrows," Sasuke told me. "That's the clear indication that you're about to say something that doesn't convey your true feelings. Why don't you just tell me what you're really thinking? Without worrying what I'll think."

This observation bothered me. It rubbed against me the wrong way, suddenly. If I had gotten one more instant to think about it I would have commended him for noticing my body language to the barest detail, for caring to look that deeply into such a trouble spirit.

But then I thought of the dog – being me – and ridiculously, I thought that his noticing the line between my eyebrows as one notices when a dog must use the bathroom. It was just something he saw as a warning, as, "Uh-oh. Here she goes again, saying something stupid."

I did not want to be the dog. I wanted to have made a better second impression on him, of being someone completely different. I wanted to wear gorgeous clothes – the camp clothes suddenly seemed hideous – and flash white teeth like the way the supermodels did, and so snappy dialogue, not stumble over my words like I had only half a mind. I wished I could have changed how I was.

And it was not anger towards him – rather, anger towards my_self_, that – Hinata, you haven't changed at _all_from four years ago, you're still aimless and inane and foolish and stuttering – this caused me to suddenly tear up, eyes welling up, and this self-hate caused me to say something inarticulate, something snarling and angry, and for me to run out of here, hand across my eyes, and out of the forest and somewhere far, far away from Sasuke Uchiha.

Maybe I was afraid of the truth.

Maybe I really was a coward.

--

--

* * *

I was reading I am Hinata Hyuuga, the previous installment of this lovely duology – my word for two books as trilogy goes to three – anyway, I was reading it, and I was cringing perpetually, and at one part – the part where they're all on a field trip and Sasuke forces Hinata to try on a two-piece bathing suit for her dumb cell-phone back – I just could _not_ read on.

Could not. It was that terrible. I _flinched_…_what _was I thinking? Ew, ew, ew. And by disparaging the fanfic I am Hinata Hyuuga, I'm not necessarily raising Au Contraire, Madam. But I am just saying that I am continuing this fanfic, ACM, and nothing, no one, and nada y nadie will stop me from finishing it. Even a terribly written - by my standards now - first story.

So there :)

Love,  
me.


	13. Burgundy and Black

Yeah, you just can't rid me, right? I keep coming back, despite desultory updating... :D

**

* * *

**

**Chapter 13**  
**Burgundy and Black**

do you remember  
the 21st night of September?  
love was changing  
the minds of pretenders  
While chasing the clouds  
away…

~_September, by Earth Wind and Fire_

* * *

I did mull over a lot of things that night – throughout the night.

I lay in my bed reflecting about my life, especially recent events, until 12 o'clock. Then I turned to my side and attempted to tell my body to sleep.

My mind, at least, would not listen. I reminded myself next time to never think things too deeply before bedtime, because I could not fall asleep. At three, I began wishing for four hours of shuteye, as I woke at seven. At four o'clock, I began to get drowsy. I didn't know what time I fell asleep.

Give or take maybe half an hour, I was awakened at seven by the sound of my alarm, and the instant I opened my eyes I could tell that today, I would move sluggishly through everything. Energy was the farthest thing from my body, right now. I closed my eyes and drifted off, until it was seven thirty, and I knew I had to rise.

I stood up groggily, daubed on concealer as carefully as I could under my eyes, dressed, and stumbled over to the lodge. Campers were already in line with clean plates for breakfast and at the tables eating. The camp counselors were finished eating. Some were talking and standing; others were supervising the campers. I took a plate and got into line on the opposite side of the campers, quickly ladled scrambled eggs and hash browns onto my plate, and sat down to a table with two chairs.

As I ate the eggs quickly, my eyes scanned around. I tried to make it look as if I were not looking for anybody, but I was looking for Sasuke. I needn't have worried. He wasn't around.

I finished, feeling my stomach still hungry, and went to the foyer of the lodge, where activities were. Bracelet-making with beads in the morning, with TenTen. I would be substituting for Neji until he came back in a week and a half.

In the afternoon there was the All-Camp Extravaganza, where all the campers participated in some outdoor activity. Karin had told me about this. The kids enjoyed it and the counselors could talk and have free time for once. It was a fitting way to end today, because it was Friday.

"Hello," I said to TenTen, when I dropped in the adjacent buildling. "This is the right place, right?"

"Yup!" she said. "Nice to meet you. Again, sort of."

I had never really talked to TenTen before today. I found myself grateful that at least I had not alienated myself from everybody in high school.

She explained to me the simplicities of bracelet-making – how to tie the knot a specific way, how to braid beads into a camper's hair. "It's pretty easy," she said, and I agreed. I went around, starting bracelets, continuing others. There came a point when all the campers were working diligently, there was no single spot of trouble anywhere, and TenTen and I lapsed into silence.

"So," she began, at the same time I said, "Um." We both laughed awkwardly. "No, go ahead." I said.

She blushed. "Do you…know – Neji?"

"Uh – yeah."

"Do you…you're cousins, right?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Then I don't have to worry about you guys sharing a roof." At this, she suddenly blanched. "Oops. I did _not_ mean to say that, for the record."

I laughed. "No. You don't have to worry about that."

"Thanks." She pushed back her hair. It was down. I remember she always used to pin it into two buns.

"Are you two…together?"

She blushed. "Um, yes. Since when we were eighteen or so."

"That's a long time!"

I guess I sounded surprised; she said, "Yeah, I suppose so. But can you imagine people being married for more than fifty years?"

"True," I said. "They would have to love each other a lot. Or have lots of stamina."

"Mainly love, though." TenTen bit a fingernail. "I've been thinking about marriage a lot. I'm getting to that age."

"Don't stress about it," I said. "I'm sure you'll find a good husband."

Her cheeks dimpled. "Thanks, Hinata."

XXX

The Extravaganza, starting at six in the evening after everyone had had dinner, was an all-around-camp scavenger hunt.

The counselors had spent weeks in preparation for this, and each counselor had a small team of campers and would be competing against the other groups. Each group had a color; mine was burgundy.

I helped tie the burgundy ribbons on the kids: for girls, in their hair (except this tomboy-ish girl whose hair was cropped to her ears; she settled for the wrist), and for boys, on their forearms. The campers were jumping up and down; they were so excited. I had six campers. I noticed that Ruu was with TenTen, and that Keito was with Sasuke. His color was black.

I smiled to myself, knowing that either he requested it or that the person allotting colors knew he wouldn't take any other color.

"All right," Ino yelled. "Quiet down. The rules for this game – "

"The 3rd Annual All-Camp Extravaganza Scavenger Hunt," Sakura cut in just to correct her. Ino scowled back, and I was surprised when Sakura stuck out her tongue. As my roommate, she seemed so serious.

"Anyway, as I was saying, before I was rudely interrupted: The rules are simple. Each team has an envelope with a hint inside that leads to their next destination. You'll go there and find another envelope of your color, and go to that destination. You go around collecting all twenty envelopes. We'll meet back here at nine-thirty. Whoever has the most envelopes wins. And if more than two teams have twenty… well, we'll deal with it then."

The campers were wriggling like Mexican jumping beans.

"All right," said Ino. "Sakura here will set the signal. When she does, the counselors will read their clues."

Sakura grinned, holding up a balloon. "When I let go, you can start," she called out. "And okay, all right, I know it's bad for the atmosphere. But we've been doing this since the beginning and this tradition stands."

"You could always use non-helium balloons," quipped Shikamaru. Sakura ignored him; she let go of the balloon. As soon as she did, the din was deafening. My campers clamored around me: "Read the hint! Read the hint!"

"All right, all right," I giggled, excited myself. I opened the unsealed envelope and drew out a white slip of paper. Printed on it were the words:

The place where you make things that queens wear  
is certainly a haven for crafts.

"What do queens wear?" I mused to my campers. Then I figured out the clue, but didn't tell them because I figured that the whole point of this exercise was for campers to figure it out, not counselors.

"Um, crowns?" ventured a girl with a burgundy bow that popped out in her wispy hair. "Those things that they hold in their hands…?"

"Scepters?" offered a boy. "Nah, that's not it."

"What are some queens famous for?" I asked the group.

A girl with glasses said, seriously, "Their acumen. And keen wit."

I bit the inside of my cheek. "Something less abstract than that."

"Clothing?"

"Pants?"

"Jewelry?"

"Bingo!" I said. "Where do campers make jewelry?"

"Nowhere?" guessed the first boy, but the girl with the glasses was already taking off to the bead place.

"Oh!" said the boy. "Duh. The bead-bracelet buildling. I should have gotten that." He ran off, and we followed. I secured the burgundy ribbon more tightly around my forehead, setting my hair back, and sprinted.

The girl with the glasses already had the next envelope clutched in her hand. "Read it!" she urged.

"Thanks." I took it from her. "What's your name? All your names?"

They were Miho, Katsuya, Taro, Azuka, Kenichi, and Saito. "I'm Hinata," I said to them, and right then, I felt very much like a counselor. "Let's open this."

By the fifteenth clue it was already 9:20. We had ten minutes to go and five more clues to be found, and our current one had been unsolvable for a long time. The boys were getting impatient, and the girls were squirming around, trying to be more mature but not succeeding.

"I'll repeat it again," I said, at my last attempt to solve it. I stifled a yawn.

"Where is the place where campers have fun,

and where can you be introduced?"

"I don't get it," complained Saito, the boy with dark hair. "Campers have fun everything. There's no one place that's the funnest… except maybe the lodge, where we have food fights."

"But we've been there before," objected Miho. "We already went to the lodge for our third clue. And we just went there and there isn't another group of clues."

"We're stuck!" wailed the wispy-haired girl.

"Azuka, we're not stuck," I told her, really telling all the campers. "We can crack this clue and hurry on to other clues… I still think the most important part of the clue is 'where can you be introduced.'"

"I don't get that part," grumbled Taro, the boy with a blue shirt. "And how do we know you're keeping the answer from us?"

"I'm not," I said helplessly, starting to get a little fed up myself. "But if we stay calm, I'm sure we'll be able to figure this out." I had been saying that for the past five minutes. The campers didn't buy it anymore. They'd plunked themselves on the grass, tearing it out with their fingers, and complaining. The sun, meanwhile, was dipping lower.

"Hey, look!" said Katsuya suddenly, her dark eyebrows jumping. "There's another group coming directly our way. Maybe we can ask them for help."

"Maybe," I said, though I doubted this. Our group had run into at least five other groups, but they'd just hurled insults at my campers and stuck out tongues. Very childish.

"Wait, they're definitely coming our way," said Kenichi. "My ma told me I have sharp eyes." Then he got into an argument with Taro over who had the sharpest eyes, and the argument progressed to other features of the face as well.

Well, look who it is, I thought. Of course it would be him. Who else? For all I knew, this meeting had been scheduled.

"You know me too well," were my first words to Sasuke as soon as he approached within earshot. He was smirking, so I knew he was happy about something. His campers immediately began arguing with mine.

"I guess I do," he humored me.

"You knew I'd be stuck here. You might have well as written the hints."

He dipped his head. "Yeah, I wrote them."

"I guess you did; they're terrible."

"Thank you," he said. His smile disappeared, and a crease formed between his eyebrows. "Are you all right now?"

I bit my lip, and could not look at him. "Yes," I whispered, wishing to shrink.

"Good," he said softly. He straightened up and, deftly, plucked the slip of paper from my hands. "You're stuck on the camp entrance clue, right?" he asked, looking straight at me and smiling. He hadn't looked at the clue once.

I took it back. _"Yes_, I am at the camp entrance… camp… entrance…" I stopped, bewildered. "Ah… oh. Thank you, Sasuke."

He smiled again, enigmatically. "We're on the nineteenth clue," he enlightened me. "What's your excuse?" And then he had herded his campers together, and they had taken off amidst excited yelling.

The night grew quiet once more. I stood there clutching the piece of paper with six saturnine campers. My heart was beating very fast.

"Whippersnappers," I said to them. "I have the answer."

We ended up with eighteen clues solves when we reached the outside of the lodge. All the other counselors had less than me, except for one.

"Congratulations, Team Hawk," Ino said (Sasuke was the only one to have named his group other than the color they had been assigned). "Your prize – home-made photo frames, decorated with beads! This was an awesome third year Scavenger Hunt! I hope you all had fun, and good night!" Ino finished her spiel and went over to jeer at Sakura, who had only gotten eleven (Ino got fourteen).

"Hey," said a familiar voice. "Hyuuga."

I turned around. "I did forget to ask you a few days ago, when Shikamaru told me," I said to Sasuke. "Why _so_ you call me Hyuuga?"

"Eh, no reason," he said. He was holding seven photo frames.

"Aren't you going to pass them out to your kids?"

"Oh, I will," he said. He seemed to be studying my face intently. "You made these today, didn't you?"

"How do you know?"

"You and TenTen were in the bead building this morning."

"Oh." My palms were clasped together. I let them loose to try to appear more relaxed, natural. "Yes – I did make some."

"Are any of the ones you made in here?" He indicated the frames.

"Um – the truth is, I only made a few. Mine weren't too good. But… yes, I can see one of mine." I held up a frame that had blue beads scattered on its edges. There was swirling glitter-glue. Looking at it, I felt a little childish to have made it.

"I like it," said Sasuke. He held it with his right hand and transferred the others to his left. "Okay. I'll hand the others out now. See you tomorrow."

And just like that, he turned and began walking away.

I told myself to take deep breaths, but I wasn't stupid. I knew what I was experiencing; the hints, unlike the ones that he had made, were all too clear. My body told me I was falling all over again for Sasuke Uchiha. My mind told me something different.

You've seen him for all of four days, after years of not seeing him. You don't deserve him and he would be terribly ignorant for wanting to be with you.

I retired to my cabin and mulled over every word we had exchanged until I was too tired to be awake. I closed my eyes, exhausted, wishing for a good night's sleep, but the larger part of me was wishing something impossible, something unfeasible in this lifetime.

* * *

**Yes, I'm back. I just can't seem to stop writing this fic. I was reading it and thinking that it must be finished because it deserves to be finished.**

**I hope you review. Words cannot express my gratitude.**

**all love,  
h.h.**


	14. Taking Chances

**Chapter 14**  
**Taking Chances**

Don't know much about your life

don't know much about your world, don't

don't wanna be alone tonight on this

planet they call earth

-_Taking Chances, Kara Dioguardi_

Days passed. I saw Sasuke sparingly, maybe once every other day, because we were both busy. Now, every day I helped TenTen in the bead building in the morning, and in the afternoon Karin and I karaoked with the kids. This was my schedule for this week. As Friday night came, and more than a week had passed since I had come, the kids left for the weekend to come back on Monday.

"You can go back home if you want to," Karin said to me, Friday at dinner. She bit into her corn muffin, chewing. She didn't wear her glasses for breakfast, and she had no makeup on, like she usually like for the weekdays. "Most counselors go back."

"Do you?"

"No," she said. "I'd go back to stay with my aunt, but she hates me."

"She probably doesn't."

"She does," said Karin, and turned her head slightly to look somewhere else. Her subtlety made me change the subject.

"You don't have an apartment?" I knew Sakura had an apartment forty minutes away.

"My parents died without leaving any money," Karin said in an almost careless tone that nearly fooled me. I could tell she had retold these words many, many times. "Their deaths came as a surprise – car crash – and my aunt is my only relative who'll take me in. Barely, at that."

"Oh," I said, wondering what one says to that. "I'm sorry, Karin."

"Don't be. My relatives are all bitches. Including the men." She grinned, but her clasp on her mug was still tight.

"I – I'll stay with you," I blurted out.

Her eyes grew large with alarm behind her glasses. "No – don't!" she opposed. "I'll be fine. You have your family to go back to."

"My parents – are dead, too."

"Oh, god – shit, I'm sorry."

"Don't be." I repeated her words. "I don't remember my mother, anyways. I… Yes. So I'll stay."

"Are you sure?" Karin bit her lip.

"Very."

"Oh, that's so exciting!" A faint, happy blush blossomed onto her cheeks. "I'm so happy. Maybe we can ask around, see who else is staying for the weekend. Maybe it'll actually be a decent weekend." Her eyes were alive with excitement.

"Sounds good," I responded, happy because she was happy.

"In fact, I'll ask right now." She looked as if she were about to jump up and dance. "Hey! Shika!"

I heard his irritated response: "What?" Shikamaru emerged from the back door of the kitchen, wearing an apron for washing dishes, see-through gloves, and a frown.

"Oh, you got the dish-washing job today? That sucks," said Karin.

I had had the dishwashing job just yesterday, for breakfast. I'd washed then and Chouji had dried them. We had talked about his barbeque sauce and how it had played a part years ago, and how his dad's sauce company was faring now.

("All right, I reckon," he'd said. "Not many people want all those extra calories now. As if it makes a difference!")

"Anyway," said Karin. "Are you going back this weekend?"

"Yeah," said Shikamaru, drying his hands on his apron, and tightening the band on his hair. "Temari misses me at home."

"You guys have an apartment together? That's pretty crazy."

"Yeah, I've gotta go back and make sure she hasn't put things in places they don't belong. She's a mad woman at cleaning. Cra-zy."

Suddenly I felt a stab of wistfulness. All right, I was nineteen. But I would e turning twenty in less than half a year. Hearing Shikamaru talk about his mature relationship with Temari made me feel both too young and too old. Too young because I hadn't had a relationship that hadn't ended in flames. Too old because they were already in a relationship, and because I didn't have one, I felt like a single spinster. Oh, shush, said my mind to the voice. Again, you're only nineteen. Hiashi would've said it was too young an age to date, anyway. But the wistfulness remained.

"Do you know anyone who's staying?" Karin was asking.

_Sasuke, Sasuke_, I found myself wishing, and Shikamaru, as if reading my mind, said, with his eyes cut in my direction, "Sasuke's going home. And so is everyone else, I think. Except… Well, it would make sense if TenTen were staying, since Neji's coming back tomorrow on Sunday. They haven't seen each other… how long?"

"Two weeks," I said. "They must be missing each other so much." TenTen always regaled me with stories of her and Neji, and how she missed him with a longing so strong she was surprised that he didn't come back with the strength of her wishing. I had talked to her yesterday after curfew, which was at 9:30.

"It's only one more day," TenTen sighed. In acting that would be drama, and overexaggeration. There was a lot of pining for lovers in acting. But TenTen…

"I just feel as if I can't go through one more day without him, you know? But then I do. Each day feels incredibly long. Have you ever felt like that?"

"But it's just one more day, right?"

She shook her head. "You don't understand, then," she murmured. "True love." Her eyes flashed something. "Those couples you see on the streets, teasing each other and making out just so other people can see them – that's not true love." Her hair slapped her in the face when she shook her head emphatically. Her shoulders rose and fell, as if from exhaustion, anger, but it was not directed purely towards me. It was directed to me and all the other people whose love is tainted.

"Love _is_ partly physical… it's also – oh, how do I explain his – I – I can _feel_ him, in my mind and in my spirit. I can hear his voice right now. I could _feel_ him – his angel bones. I – I just can't imagine… him gone." Her voice had lost that wispy, unsure quality. It had grown louder, more fervent, passionate. "It's like – even when he's gone – god, saying this – even if he's gone – forever – it's like I'll have just enough memories to hold onto so that it doesn't kill me. I mean I know what he'd be saying right now. I know, because I know him through and through. He – he'd be agreeing with me. Saying I was right. No, I just can't imagine, though… the memories last, you know. But I still want him here." she stopped. Her face was shining with a thin film of sweat. She looked beautiful, radiant, her mouth glittering like a jewel after those words. Words I would maybe never use. I felt a sharp pain in my ribs.

"Hinata," said TenTen, in her usual voice, softer. "I'm sorry for rambling so much. I – those are my true feelings… I cannot… alter them." She looked at me hopelessly. "I – I've made a fool of myself, haven't I?"

"No – no," I said, stiffly, mechanically. "You haven't. That' was amazing. I wish – "

I choked the last words out – "It would happen to me. I wish…"

"I'm sorry!" Her brown eyes were wide with distress. "Your wish – it most definitely will come true, Hinata. I can't describe how, or when – but it definitely will. It's a gradual process and you don't know it till you're in it too deep."

"True love, you mean?" I asked.

"True love," she repeated She half-smiled. Her eyes were full of tears. "You'll achieve it someday, Hina."

"No… maybe I won't," I objected. "I mean, every girl fears that she'll be an old cat lady, who'll never get married. One of those people who buy eights packs of tuna fish a week… but some girls have too eventually be cat ladies. You know? Natural selection or luck of the draw, and all that. I have a feeling it'll be me."

TenTen's face had been humorously jocular as I told of the cat lady, but at my last words she grew worried. "No, don't think like that," she said. "Don't – "

"But what if I am?"

"You're not going to be. I know you're not."

"How? How do you know? For sure?"

"Nothing's for sure," she said, backpedaling. She suddenly looked very tired. "But you have the capacity for love, Hina. I know you do. All you have to do is to find that special person now. And even if you do, you might not realize it for a long time."

"I think I already have."

"Oh! – Hina, who?" She was looking at me and trying not to appear too excited and happy for me. But I didn't tell her.

"When I find out he's the Real Thing," I said to TenTen solemnly, "then I'll tell you."

She told me that that was okay, and that she'd known Neji for six years before figuring out he was the one.

"Hopefully he _is_ your true love," said TenTen, setting down her plates and cups on the conveyor belt and putting the utensils in the black bin. "And hopefully you get together, try it out."

I was blushing. I had never felt so wistful, embarrassed, and nervous before. I clutched my shirt with sweaty hands. "I hope so, too," I whispered. Then, in a normal voice, "See you at dinner."

"See you, Hina."

The campers left Friday evening, but the counselors stayed back one night to help clean and get everything back in order. Later, there would be two buses to carry them away: one at 6 in the morning on Saturday, one at 9.

I woke at eight forty-five, and immediately ran to the bus station, five minutes away from camp. I wouldn't know what to say when I saw Sasuke, but the past talk with TenTen had fueled – I didn't know – determination? Hope? I arrived panting, feeling out of place without a carry-on bag.

His spiky black hair was nowhere in sight, but I saw a head of pink hair. Approaching Sakura, I asked her where Sasuke was.

"He's left on the earlier train," said Sakura shortly.

"Do you ha ve his number?" I asked, just so I could leave without being empty-handed. When she nodded, I continued, in a breathless, desperate voice; "Tell him… I'll see him on Monday, then."

"Tell him yourself," Sakura said. She looked reluctant. "I can give you his number."

But the confident part of with withdrew. "Never mind," I stammered. "I don't want it; never mind."

"Very well." She boarded the bus and did not look out the window once. She must think I were trying something deceiving, another tactic. Someone trying to reclaim Sasuke around her finger. He had stayed with her for four years at the camp. Of course she would be defensive of him. They were probably a lot closer friends than he and I were.

I vowed then never to show anyone my emotions of Sasuke. I was glad I didn't reveal his name to TenTen. If this were true love, like TenTen had described, surely it must be two-way, and Sasuke would one day reveal his affections. But I never would. That would be hoping for too much, taking a leap of faith that would undoubtedly send me plummeting to the bottom.

I did not want to make the same mistake again.

* * *

Next chapter: soon. While this isn't my best writing (I need to heavily edit this chapter, story; duology), I'm glad I'm finally getting the words out.

-h.h.


	15. Nothing Ever Changes

**Chapter 15**  
**Nothing Ever Changes**

Ohhh, I may be young  
But I know when I love someone  
When I love someone  
You said, "Ohh I may be young"  
But I know when I love someone  
When I love someone  
And it's you  
– Annie Stela, "It's You"

* * *

Picture any place of livelihood. A Renaissance Faire, the movie theatre. Now take away the laughter; take away the sound. Finally, strip it of its true vigor: the people.

I heard no campers laughing, saw no one milling around. The camp, a place of once-livelihood, was barren.

After twelve o'clock I checked my reflection in the mirror, decided I was too pale, and pinched my cheeks. I stepped out of the cabin, locked the door, and wandered off, aimlessly twirling the key chain. The day was humid, almost encumbering, and my feet pressed down with extra weight. The ground felt stolid and warm and comforting.

The lodge door was opened; I looked inside and saw three other counselors – the only other people who stayed the weekend.

TenTen noticed me right away and waved a little shyly. She was sitting on a couch with Karin, and someone with spiky hair was in a single couch, with the back facing towards me. Not Sasuke.

"Hi," I ventured.

He turned around, and it was Kiba. "Hi!"

We exchanged greetings, and he motioned to an empty spot next to TenTen with a smile, and continued what he was talking about.

"So yeah. Akamaru will probably miss me, but not as much. Last week he met someone." Nobody thought it was even slightly strange that Kiba called Akamaru's love interest a "someone."

"Who?" urged TenTen.

"A pink _poodle_," said Kiba disgustedly.

Karin hooted in delight. "That's un_heard _of."

"I wish," said Kiba, grimacing. "She is a tiny thing, maybe a foot high, if that? I think it was love at first sight."

"Puppy love," I said. "That's adorable."

"Not if he's _my_ dog, and a hunting one, too. He can't do anything when she's near. He trips over himself, like, I _swear_, he _slobbers_ now."

"Dogs are supposed to slobber," said TenTen astutely.

"No, he's been trained not to – at least, much less. But now, when he sees her…it's like she's a piece of meat (which she is), but he doesn't eat her, he just…cuddles her."

As we conjured up images of a giant dog being shy over a tiny pink poodle, we couldn't help but feel fuzzy feelings. We conjectured if it were possible for them to have offspring, much to Kiba's annoyance – and then decided that their babies would be incredibly, impossibly cute dogs that had killer instinct. It was amusing, to say in the least.

Given, we didn't do much work – Karin, Kiba, TenTen, and I – but no one really expected us to.

The next few days, we went swimming at the nearby lake – much bigger than the camp swimming pool. "In the beginning of the camp, when my first girlfriend and I went out – you don't know her, she's from Sound City – we found this place," Kiba explained as he waded around, warming up before his furious doggy paddle.

"I'm sure you were searching for a lake to go fishing," Karin commented dryly.

Kiba blushed, and hid under the water, his hair still sticking up quite noticeably. When he resurfaced, he said defensively, "It was just skinny-dipping."

"Nobody _wanted_ to know, Kiba," said TenTen, but she said it jokingly. She waggled her eyebrows. "So? Did you have fun?"

"_So _much," he sighed. His tongue flopped out as he adapted a dreamy look, and the resemblance to a puppy dog was so striking I laughed and threw some water at him. "I guess you broke up with her?" I mused.

"Yeah. When she found out I wasn't the rich guy she thought I was – " The rest was drowned out by the girls' shrieks of laughter, but the news, to me, was distressing. Something as materialistic as how much money he had – that had wrecked his relationship; it had been so fragile.

"Were you sad?" I cried. "Did you try to get her back?"

The laughter ebbed and Kiba looked at me with serious eyes. "Don't worry, Hinata, I didn't get my feelings hurt. 'Cuz I didn't care. We were never really for real."

I tried to mask my relief with a grin. "That's good."

But the easygoing atmosphere wasn't so easy to get back.

"Girls like that are rampant," said Karin. "And guys, too. Those types of people just think love is an accessory, and put it on and take it off whenever they feel like it."

"Or flavors," added TenTen. "They try out different people like different flavors, and when they get bored of them, they dump them."

"It's not uncommon at all, dear," said Karin. Her face was worried. "But it's totally not the real thing, don't worry."

I started to get a sniffling feeling in my nose. "Thanks, guys," I said, and laughed a little. "I just got – got apprehensive. It's nothing, though."

It was, though. I paddled away from them slowly, but I was uneasy. That, getting into a relationship, you didn't know how it would progress or end suddenly – that scared me. I had always been someone who put her whole heart into making something work. That other people didn't and didn't care for things like love made my chest hurt. I should have known the realization at a much younger age, but I'd been sequestered and now was thrust out in the open – blinding, white understandings that were alien and hurtful to me.

* * *

We only lazed around more and left it at mostly that. The other counselors were returning in a week – Neji's job as a waiter dragged out so he couldn't come to the camp, much to TenTen's dismay. The season was summer, the days were long, and emotions were running low and placid. It was the ideal temperature and temperament for bonding, and we did exactly that.

I learned that Kiba hated coldness, absolutely couldn't stand it; "When I'm older," he said to us on the fourth evening, as we gathered around the campfire, "I'm going to, like, live in a desert."

"Any desert?" questioned Karin.

"Yeah, I guess," said Kiba.

"Even a frozen one?"

"Ka-_rin_," he'd whined, and feigned to wallop her head. TenTen and I grinned at each other, each of us knowing this was cast-typing Kiba and Karin to their parts – Kiba as a dreamer, and Karin as a plotting know-it-all.

She loved trivia questions and random data – things that tested your knowledge of useless facts. I learned that her life's greatest wish was to make it to Jeopardy and win the most games. "I figure I'm going to take them by storm," she said in the lounge as we ate lunch. "Young, beautiful, and the smartest by far – they'll be clambering – or clamoring, I don't really care which – to get my autograph."

"Really?" asked TenTen, mock-skeptically. Then Karin's eyes flashed murderously and TenTen backed off, grinning and moving her hands.

I found out that TenTen was, outside of the serious conversations about relationships I'd had with her, quite jocular. She made light of a lot of things and pretended to mock things that she secretly held close to her heart. "It's not a denial thing," she assured us. "I just like to see the world through a more rose-tinted view, with more joy. I don't like things to be so down-to-earth all the time. They call me the 'Smiling Assassin' when I was in kendo in the tenth grade – because I was always smiling and joking around after I beat my opponent."

It was a take on life completely different from mine, and I confessed as much a few days later.

"I guess I have an exciting history," I said. It was my turn, now, to disclose my thoughts, reveal who I was. "I think you guys remember when I was in acting – and when I was being a guy in the academy. I didn't know any of you very well. But I was shy even then. I think it's getting better now."

"It is," said Karin and TenTen, kindly, and Kiba offered me a smile.

"It's strange," mused TenTen, "how your love exploits were talked about in the academy so much. You and Neji – thank goodness this was before I really knew him – and you and Sasuke. Don't flush, Hina, you're not like the rumors say at all. You're much quieter, and nicer. You probably even have the least romantic experience out of all of us, no offence intended, even though you had all that drama going on."

"I didn't really go out with anyone after all that," I said quietly.

"There wasn't anybody after him, huh?" inferred Karin.

I shook my head, looking away.

I guess all those days, spending around the campfire and at the swimming hole and at the lounge, talking with these three; all these days, I was waiting for something bigger. Not better, because these were the happiest weeks of my life – but something more…not deep…it was hard to put my finger on it. I wanted to fit in, but not in a group. With someone else. I found myself longing after a certain somebody, during those long summer nights, speaking deeply about matters that were important, bonding with the people I had gotten to know so well.

Maybe my wishes for more happiness brought the cup to overflow. Before the summer was over, an incident imploded disturbingly, shattering my illusions of security.

* * *

The counselors were back.

The noise outside awoke me before the turn of the lock in my cabin door did; my eyes were already open as I saw Sakura come in, dragging her suitcase on wheels behind her.

Nothing about her had changed from my memory; she was still the same task manager she had been always; she opened the suitcase, unlocked it from the key worn around her neck, and organized her folded shirts and shorts on the hooks. She traded her dusty sneakers for a pair of new pink flip-flops, looked in the mirror, and began arranging her hair. It surprised me that she chose to keep it down. It made her look more fresh-faced, though still full of autonomy. She made me feel jealous, Sakura did. She was so in charge of her life. She knew which path she was going, I thought. She'll have a happy ending, getting the man of her dreams and probably making a cool million along the way before she's even twenty-five. She was the same age as me, but I felt much younger than her in confidence, in experience.

She said not a word to me until she left.

"Had a nice time?"

"Yes," I said. I didn't want to talk to her, but I knew what was polite. "Did you?"

"The very best," she said, a little airily. But then she straightened up and looked at me with keen eyes. "I hope you had fun with the people you hung out with."

"Oh, yes," I said lamely, then was angry at myself for pretending to not have changed. I remembered all of Kiba's, Karin's, and TenTen's stories in the back of my mind; it would be cowardly not to stand up for them. "I made friends." That sounded even worse, so I vowed to keep my mouth shut unless necessity required. I was always tongue-tied around people I didn't know very well. It was better to say little.

"That's good," she said, her green eyes sharp. She went out the cabin and shut the door cleanly behind her.

I didn't know what to do or feel after that. Her encounter left me speechless and dazed, like I wasn't getting enough oxygen. I was suddenly reminded of the gulf between timidity and poise – and I hated that I acknowledged it so much. I had changed, yes – I had changed so much in the past few weeks – ! but it still seemed like this wasn't enough. Would never be enough. The day wasn't even starting yet, and I had the helpless feeling that it would be an awful one. That was what talking to Sakura did – left you hanging and with a feeling of longing that maybe one day you'd be like that, although you knew you probably wouldn't, because she was in an entirely different league of self-assuredness, calmness.

I felt pretty bad, but told myself to pep up as I sat up and got dressed. I even managed to make it to the lounge for breakfast five minutes early, though I took an inordinate amount of time in the shower and freshening myself up. My hair was clean, my nails and face scrubbed, and I'd even put on some mascara to help things along. I'd gotten enough sleep, and I was thinking that the day maybe wouldn't be so bad after all, when, waiting in the breakfast line, I saw something that made my appetite drop.

Sakura and Sasuke, holding hands as they made their way to their table: talking, laughing, happy.

* * *

Alright; I'm a hopeless cause, a basket case.


	16. Jeez

**Chapter 16**  
**Jeez**

Don't wait or say a single vowel  
You need to hear me out  
So they said s_peak now  
-_Speak Now, Taylor Swift

It was unbearable to do – I would label it as the hardest thing I had done save for its complete inaction – but I took my breakfast and sat down at my own table in an accepted, normal way, my heart pumping most abnormally.

I'd seen the look on his face when he was humoring me, competitive, mundane, and even angry.

But oh, god; the way he looked now – so happy, so at peace. I'd leave him alone forever save for the unhappiness that resounded from the core of my being.

I was still selfish – that depraved quality attributed to spoiled brats. I'd seen his face, his expression of content, even elation, but I was not happy. What was wrong with me? Too much, I guessed.

"Girl, what's wrong? You look sick."

"Do I?" The sounds that came from me were faint and unclear. I could not believe they were words and that she could understand them.

"Yes, you do," she said, looking closer. "Have you come down with fever? Is that why you wore makeup, to try to cover it up? Your eyes and cheeks are really red."

"I just didn't get enough sleep last night," I lied, though saying this, I at once felt the effects of sleep-deprivation, like a curse descending on me, like I'd actually slept very little. "God, I Feel exhausted."

"What is it? You can tell me."

"God, I can't. I'm sorry, Karin. I really am. But I can't talk right now. In fact, I…just…tell me when the campers get here. I'll be in my room."

Excusing myself, I made my way to the door of the lodge, without coming near Sasuke. I'd had such great hopes for me and him. Maybe they'd been selfish, too.

* * *

I didn't stay in my cabin for long. In fact I only bypassed it to change into my counselor shirt, light grey. The whole thing is muy ridiculoso, I told myself. He never was yours and I don't think he'll ever be.

The thought just downright depressed me, and I got mad for being depressed, period, and kept walking and walking until I reached the swimming hole, half a mile from the camp. It was the place where I'd learned so much about Kiba, TenTen, Karin, and I Also had thought it was the ideal place for a camp pool, much bigger than the plastic pool inside the building next to the Lodge – but TenTen had explained that the swimming hole was too far away for the campers to walk to, especially in this type of heat, and bussing was expensive, too much for the camp's funds. "It's practically what-do-you-call-it. Non-profit," complained Kiba.

"Oh, well," Karin had temporized. "It's only a summer job for when college is out. At least we're making good decisions, not drinking and such."

"Still," complained Kiba, "Drinking's _fun_." And he'd earned a kick from TenTen.

The memory made me want to laugh, but a more present state of affairs held sway in my mind. I just couldn't believe he'd be persuaded by her and her feminine wiles and pink hair so easily (or had it been totally his own volition?). He had been holding hands with her, he had been smiling…that could really only mean one thing: that he was _with_ her.

But I couldn't do anything about it, and it hurt my heart to think of trying. If he was happy, then let him be. And, well, if they'd break up one day, that's their thing.

I stared into the empty body of water that was the swimming hole. A few fishes had gotten up early, started swimming around.

I didn't know why I liked him so much, anyway. He was real, but there were lots of "real" guys around. He wasn't the romantic type I dreamed about. He was caustic and direct and I had the feeling he was hiding himself behind barbed wire, but so what? That wasn't any of my business. I had the theory that my crush on him from the days we'd boarded together had leftover feelings, which were being dumped on me now. I didn't enjoy that.

Confusing was a nice word to describe my current dilemma. I got a rock and threw it; it arced high over my head and landed far away. I'd overshot. I had been aiming for the swimming hole, maybe scatter some fishies. That was how I felt right now. Uncaring and vindictive.

But I'd have to go back, as usual. Maybe even now, Karin was knocking on my cabin door, telling me it was time and that the campers had arrived. I pictured her opening the door softly – nobody ever locked their doors during the day – and discovery only my bed sheets, the hamper, my clothes. Full of my presence in only m absence.

She'd go back, because she needed to: she was only of the head counselors, though they didn't officially have designations like that. And she would wonder where I was, and be the only one. No one else would notice or care.

Stop being such a dead-end, I told myself. Go do shit because it's your job. It was my acting voice, telling me to do things even if I found it particularly hard, or loathsome, which had been acting for me.

So, like on every other ay when I'd been acting, I collected myself and got up to do work.

At least years of acting had taught me discipline. I walked back to the campsite, my legs striding faster and faster, my eyes blurring every now and then.

Walking along, unable to shake the feeling I was walking to my death sentence.

* * *

"Where have you been?" Karin said as soon as she saw me. She put her hand on the small of a camper's back and pushed her to where she was supposed to be. Karin had changed into her light grey camp counselor T-shirt as well and her face wore a pinched expression.

"Nowhere," I said. "Just around."

"Don't lie to me," said Karin. "I know you're upset."

I was startled. I didn't know some people could read my face like they did the back of a can of tomato soup to see its nutritional content. My heart felt open, wounded, sure, but I had thought it didn't show on my face.

"I can read it all over you," she said. I didn't like her tone, like figuring me out was a given. What if I didn't like to be ripped part and examined?

"I don't know what you're talking about," I only said.

"Your expression," she said, peering closer. Her eyes swam, magnified by her lenses. "Like a dog that's been kicked."

Something in me snapped. "Thank you so much for that comparison!"

She drew back. "I'm just _saying_," she said, and her voice was hurt, but she said it the way you would say, "Don't get mad over _that_."

And then suddenly I _was _mad. I pressed my lips together and left without saying a word. I could feel her eyes following me, bewildered, maybe, or hurt. You always hurt the ones who care about you the most – this type of anger is easy to access.

I walked over to where Sakura was. She had the paper which told you where to go. I asked her where I was. She looked at me, a casual, non-assessing look, but it made me feel all the more insignificant, like I wasn't worth it, or something. I vowed to memorize my schedule so I wouldn't have to ask her again.

"You're in board games," she said. "With TenTen, in the gondola."

"Oh," I reacted. "I've never been there before."

"It's a new schedule." She didn't sound put-off or annoyed at all. I wondered if her new relationship with Sasuke lent her more patience, goodwill. "The gondola is about a hundred yards up from the pool. You can't miss it."

I knew where it was; I just hadn't had an activity there. But I didn't tell her. I only nodded and collected my campers – only eight today – and made my way there.

Timidity is a bitch, sometimes.

* * *

I didn't do much after that. All my energy had been spent on that morning, and I needed to cool off before attempting to hurtle back into the maelstrom.

TenTen and I taught how to play the board games, and played with the campers, but I could not tell you which ones and who won. My mind seemed to be shut down, dormant. I wonder for how long? I thought hazily. I ate lunch with TenTen and the campers, and I had the afternoon off, since there were shifts now, with new counselors in.

Neji was one of them, and with wanting to see him again so badly, TenTen wolfed down her alfalfa sprout sandwich. Jeesh. If you're going to be healthy, might as well pretend to enjoy it.

"I can't believe he's back, I just can't believe it," she was saying. The campers were minding their own business. Good children, they were.

"It's all right," I said to her absent-mindedly.

"Do I look all right? Is my hair good? I put it up yesterday but left it down this morning! Oh _why_ did I have to leave it down? I never know if it'll curl or frizz!"

"It's fine," I assured her. "Besides, love, unlike beauty, is not skin-deep."

She grinned at me. "I'm pretty sure I gave you that line when I was in one of my more delirious moods. Well, even if Neji doesn't care about how I look, _I_ sure do." And she hunted around for her compact while I blearily arranged the set of a board game. "Here's one open," I said to two campers, who were waiting around.

"Don't nag," objected a camper when I told him for the third time that he should be done playing.

"Hurry up," I repeated, not paying attention to his expression. If I had I would have seen it metamorphosize from affronted to bawling and mutinous.

"I – don't – _wanna_!"

"Jeez, Malcolm," I said. My hands started to sweat. He continued to shriek, tears popping from his eyes. "Jeez, stop _yelling._"

Godammit, godammit. Jesus, he could yell the place down. I considered beating him up so no noise could escape from him, then reckoned that was how Shaken Baby Syndrome had developed. What was _wrong_ with me?

The door opened forcefully, slamming against the walls and nearly bouncing back. "Hinata! What are you – " TenTen grabbed hold of a checkers game piece and thrust it into Malcolm's flailing hand. "Here, you be black - and - and I'll be red. Okay? Can you stop yelling for me?"

Much to her credit, and my resignation, he stopped. He was seven years old, and he sucked his thumb a little as he thought about where to place his game piece. God, I would have said spoiled, but it was my fault, too. My complete inability to deal with kids today –

"Hey, Hinata."

I looked up from my crouch and saw who had followed TenTen here. He stood grinning at the doorway with one hand on the knob and one hand on a large gift bag. Like all boys, he'd grown a lot in a few years. He'd gotten thinner, too, but it suited him.

"Hey, Neji," I said tiredly.

"Are you alright? You seem sort of frazzled." He was the second person to ask me that today, and my eyes wanted to fill with tears. No, I was not alright, but it would take much more to get me to tell the truth.

"Yes." Me, a pathological liar.

"I got something for you," he said, and pulled out something gift-wrapped.

"Oh, wow. Jeez. You shouldn't have." 'Jeez' was fast becoming one of my most-used expressions. I couldn't express myself articulately anymore; had I ever?

"It's no skin off my back," he said. "You'll have to pardon the wrapping, though. I used way too much paper and way too much tape."

"She'll spend hours unwrapping it, the poor thing," said TenTen. She stood up, waited to see if Malcolm would object (he didn't, selfish kid), and wound her arms around his waist. It would have been awkward, because I had never seen the either of them with someone else like that, and it was like one of those brainteasers that said 'What is wrong with this picture?', but mostly I felt gladness for them. They deserved each other, in the best way possible.

"Come on, let's go to the Lodge," said TenTen. She pressed her lips to Neji's cheek and made to turn off the lights. I managed to extricate Malcolm from his game and hold his hand to lead him to the Lodge.

He gave me a bright smile, as if he didn't notice I had been the one from earlier almost about to throttle him."Where's Emmy and Daniel?" he asked me.

"They're in the Lodge," I told him. "All the other campers are. You just hung around to keep playing games, remember?"

"Oh," he said. He grinned, then. "I'm gonna tell them I beat Tenny at checkers!"

"You did not," said 'Tenny.' She was holding Neji's hand. "We didn't get to finish."

"Still," said Malcolm, thoughtfully. "I ate two pieces and you ate one, so I win."

I have to admit, I liked his logic. Very cutthroat for such a competitive society. He'd be valedictorian one day, mark my words.

"When are you going to unwrap my present?" Neji asked me, his eyes twinkling. He seemed to see into my soul. I know, it sounds corny, but some people's eyes can do that. It made me feel like there had been no time lost between us, as if I'd seen him just yesterday.

"I guess in the Lodge," I said. He opened the door for TenTen and me, and as soon as Malcolm was in he shot across the room to meet up with his cohorts.

"I'm telling you, it'll take some time," came TenTen's voice, drifting back.

I laughed. "I have the patience."

"Seems like you've gotten more mature," Neji said to me. The three of us took a table which seated mostly Neji's old friends – Rock Lee, Kiba, Naruto. I saw Karin sitting two tables away and I wanted to hold her gaze, signal in some way that I was sorry for earlier, but she didn't notice.

"Thanks, Neji," I said. Neji was getting reacquainted with his friends/ To them I asked, "Does anyone have scissors?"

"I don't know what I'd be doing carrying around scissors," Rock Lee told me, his brows furrowing, "but I actually do have a pair." He produced small scissors from his pocket, which were, I don't know, somehow creepier than big scissors.

"Thanks," I said, and got to work hacking away at the wrapping paper.

"Sorry," Neji threw at me from his conversations with his friends, grinning. His eyes were twinkling. Beside him, TenTen whacked him a little, and smiled at me too, a sugary-innocent smile that suggested she'd never do violence.

I shook my head a little, grinning.

After ten minutes I was no longer in sunshiny mood. "Will – this – tape – _never_ – come off?" I grumbled, receiving only a cheery, "Told ya," from TenTen and a sorrowful look from Neji. Used tape was an exasperating thing. It wound around and yanked back at your fingers, and when it got skinnier and twisted it was _impossible_ to cut.

"Dag blast it," I muttered, my hair falling messily around my face from exertion, "Remind me never to receive your gifts again, _Neji_ – "

"You can accept gifts from me, then, Hyuuga," said a familiar voice by my ear. I caught myself from turning around and whacking into his face, but more importantly, to avoid seeing him. The previous anger from the morning resurfaced, bubbling angrily.

"What are you doing here?" I whispered, trying not to hiss.

"Oh, nothing much," he said airily. The lightest breath brushed against my cheek. I wanted to rub the feeling away.

"What are you doing?" I repeated. I hoped I wasn't trying too hard to get an answer from him. I hope he couldn't tell. I'd thought he was a rationale human being. Full of mysteries, but not so that he'd force these mysteries on other people. It was hurting my mind to give reasons why he would do this.

"You shouldn't be doing this," I told him.

"It's not of your business if I am."

"Why _are_ you? So you can show the world how many hoes you have up your sleeve? That you can have any girl you want, including the shy ones. Well, I'm not – "

" – playing my game?" he finished. "I'm not playing a game, Hinata." I felt his grin. A shit-eating grin. God, what he could do to me, including making me say language that was not a little obscene. The whole stupid ordeal made me want to curse.

"If you want to talk to me," I said bluntly, "then do it like a normal person. I can't have you crawling on my shoulder, like some wormy caterpillar."

"All right, then." I felt the sudden absence of warm air near my ear, and a few moments later he was sitting down directly across from me. "If you don't mind," he said to Neji politely, who moved to accommodate Sasuke.

Seeing him made my head pound, heart hurt. All these physiological functions, and what resulted from them? Nothing. I had to tell my body to stop with the getting ahead of yourself, please.

"How's your day been?" he asked me obliquely. Dark eyes cut through the dark fringe of his hair that swept down to the dark jacket he was wearing outside of the camp T-shirt…follow it down to a dark pair of jeans and, probably, under the table, dark shoes.

"Well, thank you," I said. I wish this was how he had greeted me this morning, before I had seen him with Sakura and before he had been leaning over me like some possessed thing. "And how was your day back?" Good job being civil, I told myself. Keep it up.

"Excellent," he told me.

My civil demeanor cracked instantly. "This isn't a _soap_ opera, Sasuke," I snapped at him. "You won't do any good making me jealous."

"I guess you admit it."

"I admit nothing," I shot back. The nerve!

He smiled, a surprisingly warm smile. "Jeez, Hinata. If I'd known that you'd act like this, I wouldn't have bothered." I was stunned, if not from his confession that it had been a plan all along, from the fact that he used the word 'jeez,' too. Like me!

"Bothered with what?" I demanded.

"Talking to you," he said.

"You know what I mean. What was – wh-what was this morning all about?"

"Oh, you mean the hand-holding? with Sakura? Hinata, our hands were glued together."

"Really?"

"No, stupid." He reached across and ruffled my hair.

"Hey!"

"You're a child. No, I was just joking, don't glare at me like that."

"They weren't _glued_ together," I exploded.

"No, they weren't," he said contritely, his eyes serious. "They were _nailed_ – "

"Sasuke, if you think I'm going to sit here listening to stupid excuses, you're wrong."

"Remind me never to provoke you again," he said, half-admonishing my volatility. "Besides, it was just something brief. Not even. Just an anomaly. It's incongruous, really. So really, no, you don't have to worry about it."

"If you don't use SAT words all the time, I might actually understand you."

He actually flushed. "They make me seem smarter."

"Or make you have a big head." I was still glowering at him. "What was it _really_ about, Sasuke? You can't tell me it wasn't nothing."

"Oh, maybe I felt something," he said, peering at me. A pause. Then, "Like, maybe _friendship_?"

"Are you sure? That didn't look like it."

"No, really. You always have a hard time believing my words, but this time it's true. You have nothing to worry about."

"I really don't believe you."

"You see? You gotta have a little faith in me."

"I've only seen you for five _days_."

"It doesn't matter," he said, almost to himself. "It feels like years."

"Sasuke," I said. I was almost in tears, I could feel them pooling in my eyes. "I wish you'd just _explain_ – "

"You don't really need a demonstration, do you?" he interrupted. He leaned forward, his eyes shining wickedly. "In front of the entire camp, with all the counselors and innocent little campers looking on?"

"You're ridiculous," I realized aloud. "Don't think I believe you for a second."

"You don't have to," he told me. He swung his leg off the bench and stood up. "I'll see you around," he said. "I should know, I altered some schedules."

"Sasuke," I protested, needing some better explanation than the paltry half-ones he'd just given me. "Just wait a moment here – "

He turned back, grinned. "I know how much you love having me around, but I gotta go."

What was his problem?

So many. So, so many.

* * *

I tried not to make it cliche, but oh well :). I suppose more will be revealed.


	17. His Confessions

This is one of my better chapters. I've been listening to Taylor Swift a lot :P I always do.

* * *

**Chapter 17  
His Confessions**

And I don't know how it gets better than this  
You take my hand and drag me head-first, fearless  
And I don't know why but with you I dance  
In a storm in my best dress, fearless  
-Taylor Swift, _Fearless_

The day was ending, making its fiery curtain disappear like a magician, and its blackness made the light bulbs inside burn even brighter. I was sitting next to a strange young man and a group of people who I wanted to get to re-know.

He kept poking me. I seemed to get annoyed easily these days; after the third poke I whacked his hand away. "You're not acting your age."

"No," he agreed. "But I'm glad I have the old Hina back."

"What do you mean?"

"You were like this when we were at the academy – irritable, restless, fun to tease."

"What a gentleman."

"No, I'm serious." His eyes were large and expressive, up close. "I haven't seen you as much these days, but it's good that it didn't take that much time to break the ice."

"I still feel pretty frosty."

"That's because that's your true _nature_," he explained.

"I guess it's your true nature to be out with several girls at once." I eyed him, and cut him off when he tried to retaliate. "You haven't cleared that part up for me, being with Sakura. I can't really talk to you until you tell me why – "

"That's not important," he said. "It was something else, and it wouldn't do good to her dignity if I were to tell you."

"So what _was_ it all about?"

"Nothing." He saw the expression on my face. "Okay, maybe I'll tell you…but only after months and months."

"…"

"Alright; weeks and weeks. But I'm telling you again, that part's not important. It would've done the same thing if you didn't see me with her. It didn't have anything to do with you; I'd have talked to you tonight anyway."

"I'm sure," I grumbled, but his sincerity was getting to me. Like a headache. "Okay, okay, I believe you. Now can we talk about the reason you're in such a weird mood? So funny and ironic and witty and poking fun? Literally poking fun? I thought you were supposed to be dark and brooding."

He smiled comfortably. "I guess I've changed. But listen – ! I've wanted to talk with you for ages. And I haven't seen you that much, here in camp. The last few days I was back because of break, I thought about talking to you and decided I would. We have to have a conversation."

"Aren't we having one?"

"You know. A genuine one. One where I won't be annoying and you won't be annoyed."

"I'm _not_ – oh, alright. Maybe I am."

"You see? You can't be hung up about things when we talk about deep stuff."

"Deep stuff? Like what?" I knew, of course. Things I'd been wondering about concerning him, me, the past, the future. All that New Age crap fortune-tellers love to wax poetic about.

"Like…" For the first time in talking to me, Sasuke looked uncertain. "I guess…the ways we've changed, and the past, what happened…" His voice shook. "I could say I need you to talk with me about these things. They're very important. I feel like I haven't been able to express myself these past years. There's been a hole – " He took my hand, a very natural gesture for him, but a sudden new feeling for me. I looked at him and could not take my eyes off of his. "…here," he said. "There's been a hole here." He was holding my hand just beneath his collarbone. At his heart. All the cynical comments fled from my head. I could only stare at him, witless.

He waited for me to speak, but there was no chance words could escape from my throat, it was so taut. He let go of our hands. I think his face was becoming red. "I guess what I'm trying to say is…is that I need you, Hinata. Things haven't been the same without you."

I wanted to throw a party, throw my arms around his neck. Those words were better than chocolate. My eyes were filling.

"I did date a lot of girls, to fill up that hole, but they couldn't. I knew you were special when I met you – hell, you were _strange_, but I didn't know until you were – gone."

That's so cheesy, my intellectual mind was saying, but it was weak and I didn't pay ay attention; my emotional side was spilling over. The cup spilleth over. I couldn't talk, so I leaned forward, and hugged him. This time, the action was very natural for me, but I could feel him tense under my touch. He'd gotten different, sure, from these years apart, but he still shied away from physical contact. He was still the same Sasuke inside.

"Thanks, Sasuke," I whispered to him. I didn't care who was watching, I felt so full inside, full of happiness and longing and an emotion I couldn't quite name. "Thanks for all you said, it means so much to me."

He shifted so that his face wasn't in my hair. "Don't get a big head from all this," he mumbled into my shoulder.

* * *

Under the trees, under a bottomless sky without stars, him and me, walking. We weren't holding hands or anything. I think I overestimated the extent of his and Sakura's relationship upon seeing their intertwined hands. Like TenTen said, the couples who hold hands in public and laugh loudly are those who aren't truly in love. Love is a careful affair, she had told me later. Both people have got to tread softly, and go slowly into it. I don't really believe in love at first sight. Not that it's not impossible. Just that there are surer, more certain ways to fall in love.

She was right, I found. We were walking under the trees, and there was some talking, mixed with some pockets of silence that were comfortable, not awkward. It was the most peaceful moment of that day. The morning felt infinitely far away, and the day had ended – or almost ended – much more auspiciously than it had begun. I smiled sleepily.

"Do you think now's a good time for deep conversations?" he asked me.

I answered, "I don't know. I'm feeling sort of full already. Full of emotions, about to burst."

I could feel his grin. "Me, too."

"But I feel like I could tell you anything and it would be deep," I said, "so talking right now would count, I guess."

"That's good." A pause. Then, his tone was careful. "My friend from American, Paul, told me I was incapable of love."

Love? That word would have struck me as an alien one, but right now, in this moment, it seemed like just another component of life. I liked this atmosphere.

"Why's that?" I asked.

"I was too bitter, he said. This was a year and a half ago, if I remember correctly. We were in our dorms, commenting on girls, and he said I was criticizing every one of them."

"I bet that didn't make you feel better."

"What could I say to that? 'Oh, sorry, I take my words back?' No, because they were true. I felt them." He laughed a little, shakily. "Paul said that my head was too far up in the clouds, that my standards were too high. 'You are a block of ice,' he'd told me. 'No woman would tap that. You're probably going to end up a lonely bachelor, or married to some woman you don't love.' His words shook me. I was so angry after that, I wanted to strangle him. But I didn't, because his words were true. 'Incapable of love,' he'd said. And I guess it's all true."

He had agreed not to delve into deeper conversations, but this was the deepest I'd ever talked to him about. I wanted to stop, look at his expression, see if he was okay. But we continued to walk. He seemed to stride faster.

"No, it's not. Sasuke, wait up." I half-ran up to him, grabbed his hand. To hell with stupid boyfriend-girlfriend gestures, I wanted to comfort him. He needed to be comforted. "Sasuke, that's the past, it's not true now. Look at you, you've changed, for the better – "

"Look," he said, and his voice was real; raw; "you don't need to feel bad for me. It's really all true, but it's none of your concern. I can't have you worrying after my stupid flashbacks and stupid remembrances – "

Right then I wanted very much so to kiss him, to shut it up. But the coward in me saw that we were not at that level yet, despite the emotional words exchanged. And so the coward in me didn't move, and I just held on to his hand like an ornament, useless and immobile.

To the silence he said, "I don't know why I'm telling you this."

"Oh, Sasuke," I cried, knowing that he was attempting to draw the impenetrable curtain around him again, stave him off from the world, even me.

He was very young and miserable. I suddenly realized what I'd done to his life when I was at the academy – certainly not changed it for the better. Even back then, I wondered, was he like this? popular and in the middle of the crowd, but alone, having nobody real to talk to? And the years I was gone – was that all just very much the same? The day must look all the same if he was living like this, I thought, and tears pooled down my face.

"Are you crying?" He stopped suddenly, inspected my face up close. "Good god, you _are_ crying." He fumbled in his pocket for something, a handkerchief, maybe, but couldn't find it; he brought his hand to my eyes and rubbed the tears off. His fingers were very cold.

"No, it's all right," I tried to say, but he wouldn't listen. He immediately hugged me close to him. We walked like that, ridiculously so, me pressed to his coat label and smelling what it smelled like. Like pine trees and him, pleasant but mysterious.

He was walking faster, but I could keep up because he was supporting me. I knew where we were going; I was going home, to my cabin, and he to his. But I didn't want to go; I wanted to be near him. Make sure that he didn't sequester himself from me anymore. I wanted to wake up and make sure that he was still opened to me, could still talk deeply to me.

"Don't struggle," he said to me, "We're almost there."

I saw the cabin lights before the ground became hard, cement once more. No more soft pine needles or soil – just hard grey reality. I sniffed; my nose was clogged up.

"Don't leave," I said to him, but he only straightened up and shook his head. I could still feel the warm of his rough coat against my cheek – "No, really, don't." I couldn't seem to convey to him the important of his staying with me. It kept me sane; him, too.

"I have to," he said. He gave a half-laugh, very deliberate, false. "I think I've talked with you enough today. You've had enough of me, anyhow."

"No," I told him, but then he had turned away and was walking back. I waited too long; I waited for a few more seconds than I should have. Suddenly he was too far away and could only hear me if I shouted my hardest. And I was too weak for that.

I berated myself, then, like a lunatic, reassured myself. It was like I was becoming undone at the seams; I would change emotions from one end of the spectrum to the other in the duration of seconds. He'll come back tomorrow, I told myself. But I knew that tomorrow, he'd be withdrawn, if not moody. For certain, he wouldn't talk to me like he'd talked to me today. He'd think I was too fragile, inexperienced. I kicked at a clump of grass by the cement.

But I guess he was right, and that was what hurt me the most.

I knocked on the cabin door to let Sakura know I was coming in, and opened it. She wasn't in there; I couldn't say I was stricken with disappointment. I tugged the hamper to my side of the room and threw my counselor shirt and jeans into it; I got into my teddy shirt and pajamas. My feet were shivering. I wondered if I led as a secluded lifestyle as him, if I would turn cold permanently, both inside and out.

Irrational fears, I told myself, and went to brush my teeth and wash my face. I finally climbed into bed, exhausted.

I couldn't fall asleep. Half an hour later Sakura came in and she went in the bathroom for a few minutes before getting in her own bed. The silence was cold between us, but soon she was asleep, her breaths deep and even.

I was still wide-awake, my eyes straining in the darkness. I couldn't see a thing, but I had the feeling someone was watching me. I wanted to climb out of my bed and click on the light, but was too craven to do even that. So I snuggled deeper into my covers and hoped sleep would catch me.

After a while I figured it out. The feeling I had was me, watching me.


	18. Tumbling

Unfortunately, it's the peppy and the not-so-bad or appropriate songs that get stuck in your head. Like the one below. yeah.

* * *

**Chapter 18**  
**Tumbling**

You make me  
Feel like  
I'm living a Teenage Dream  
The way you turn me on  
I can't sleep  
Let's runaway  
And don't ever look back  
Don't ever look back  
- Katy Perry, _Teenage Dream_

I didn't know how to feel, so I figured to just let myself go, feel anything I wanted. The next morning I felt hungover, though I'd never actually been that before. I felt, I don't know, like someone had hit not only my head, but my heart, and my soul ( - if I had a soul, I guess; I wasn't religious by any standards - ) with a sledgehammer. Add a couple of empty beer bottles by my bed and you'd have the complete image.

I kicked back my covers and got out of bed, climbing carefully down the tiny ladder. Sakura was gone, as usual. She had her own schedule, and it involved getting up at least an hour earlier than I did, and getting to the cabin at night later. She was a head counselor, anyway. She had more work to do.

Yesterday's mascara was still on. "It's a stupid invention," I grumbled to myself. "And I'm not wearing it again." Au naturale, then, for today. Not even blush. I don't think anything could have made me look prettier, anyway. Not today.

My hair was getting longer; I needed to give it a good cut one of these days. I measured it in the back to discover that it was finally long enough to hold a ponytail. After tying my hair three times with an elastic, I felt a little better. Today was light green camp counselor shirt day; we switched every other day. I washed my grey one in the sink and hung it up to dry. Sakura's was already almost dry; it was hung carefully and not a bit creased. (Mine were already creased due to quick, careless washings and dryings.) I put on my black shorts and sneakers, no flip flops today. Sneakers meant taking charge, being more in control of yourself. Flip flops meant lax. At least my clothes could try to express the confidence that I didn't feel inside.

"Lighten up," I said to myself. My voice was thin, not strict, but it did the trick. I sighed and tried to collect myself. Lightening up meant...having a smile? Okay, then. A smile.

I walked into the Lodge with a smile. Karin saw me right away from where she was getting breakfast for the campers ready, spooning Lucky Charms into bowls. She walked over to me. I felt the stiffness on my mouth turn into a real smile. "Hey."

"Hey yourself," she said. "Oh look, the Prairie Dog Girl speaks."

I felt stiff again. "What do you mean?"

"Prairie dog," she said. "It's a mammal that lives in mostly Western U.S.A that stays immobile in its hole until it pops out." She peered at me in that way she had. "I guess you've popped."

"That sounds strangely double entendre," I said, attempting to be humorous. "I still don't get it."

"You weren't talking to me before," she explained. "What's the special occasion now?"

"_That_ was a special occasion," I said, trying hard not to feel mutinous. "I'm sorry. I was in a bad mood that time."

She looked like she might counter that, but then her tightened features softened.

"Forgiven," she said. "You've lots to tell me from last night, I heard?" she asked lightly. But the atmosphere was still thick.

I felt my smile, fake or real, slide off my face. "Ah, not really," I said, "but how do you know?"

"I was sitting three tables away," she said tolerantly, but her eyes betrayed her impatience. "I heard from TenTen and Neji, too; he's back but you know that already. I also heard he gave you a present. What was it?"

I thought she was being too interested in my own affairs, but I readily answered: "It was a Rubik's cube. A special one, for the 30th anniversary, I think."

She nodded. "Very cool," she said. She took a breath, and I had a tingle at the back of my neck. I knew what she was going to ask next. Karin might have thought it was subtle, but it was as obvious as a fox circling a nest.

"What about Sasuke?" she asked. "I heard you guys left dinner early to go somewhere."

You heard, or you saw? I thought. I shrugged. "We walked a little."

"Did anything else...happen?"

I had the uncomfortable feeling I wanted to rebel, snap off this conversation as it was going nowhere. I would pretend, she would pretend, and it would do nothing for our friendship. I hadn't known Karin could be so inquisitive.

Lighten up, Hinata, I reminded myself, like I always had to. "Nothing really," I said. "We talked about...um, the past, and then my cabin was there. It's not such a long walk to the cabins, you know. Maybe five minutes, at most." Fifteen minutes, yesterday, because we had walked so slowly, reliving the memories, speaking of things that matter. Although Karin was my friend, my first friend since I came here, she did not need to know that.

"Oh," she said. I saw her eyes go down, and slant. I suddenly felt sorry for her. She didn't know she was being obvious, that I would not tell her of what Sasuke and I had talked about. The events and exchanges were too raw, even for the two of us. Explaining them to Karin would be like being the kid who gave cupcakes to the class on his birthday: he'd be celebrated for a quick minute, then remembered only for the food he brought. He'd be washed away, forgotten the next period. Like dirty clothes, these secrets would be washed, hung, and dry - and become meaningless. I didn't want that to happen.

"Really," I said. "Nothing happened." Nothing in the sense that she hinted at, anyway. Only the revelation that Sasuke was a lonely and broken man. But I don't think this news would pique her interest. "I have to go," I said.

Karin gave me a searching look, but I didn't meet her eyes. "I'll see you later," I said. I hurried off before her expression changed. What was I afraid of? Her anger? No; she wasn't that type of person, though doubt nagged at my mind. She'd be disappointed, maybe. I reached the table I usually sat at. TenTen and Neji and Kiba weren't there. I sat, waiting for them, confused at the rift in my friendship with Karin. It wasn't...tactile, I couldn't put my finger on it, indicate the exact spot that I felt discomfort with her. It was more of an overall feeling, a collection of slightly-off gestures, too-close questions. It had originated from the time I had snubbed her after she'd been concerned. So in a lot of ways, this was my fault.

It wasn't my fault, however, that Sasuke had chosen last night as a chance to reacquaint ourselves, and, as a result, cause for us to become the spotlight. It wasn't my fault Karin was peculiarly interested in last night's episode. That was her own curiosity at work there. Maybe something stronger than curiosity. She had liked Sasuke for a while, after all.

My head was aching. I wanted TenTen to come. But paradoxically, most of all, I wanted to talk to the old Karin. She'd understood.

As the bell rang eight times, I watched as the campers filed in one by one, happy, maybe some tired and annoyed, but overall still whole, genuine. I wonder when they'd get disillusioned, and hoped the best for them.

A little girl came running up to me. "Hi, oldie."

"Who are you? Wait - you look...familiar." She had stood there next to me, two weeks ago, perhaps, when I had just arrived here. "Keito?"

"Hi," she said again. "Yeah, I'm Keito. Are you still scared of spiders?"

I blushed as she looked at me critically. "Yes," I said in a shameful voice. "Very much so."

"I'll get you a fake spider one day," she decided. "So you can get scared again."

I noticed that her hair was lopsided. "Come here," I patted my side of the table. "I'll fix your pigtail for you."

"I like them sideways," she said. But good-naturedly she let me.

"Where are you supposed to be, anyway?"

"With my group," she said. "The Jaguars. We're making cakes today!"

"That's exciting. What kind of cake?"

"Oh, I don't know. It's too tight," she complained. She tugged at her hair, the part I'd just done for her, and lo and behold, it was lopsided again. She gave me a smile; she was missing a tooth. "Sorry. Wanna do it again?"

"Nah," I said. I grinned. "You like it that way, anyway."

"Okay, then. Thanks." She hopped down from the table like only a little kid with miniature legs could, and ran off. No formalities exchanged, no pleasantries, just a knowing that the interaction was over. I wished I could be as succinct as her, forgo conventions of society like that.

All the counselors were in now. I spotted TenTen and Neji getting breakfast, scrambled eggs and toast today, like every third day. I ambled off and got my breakfast and sat next to them when they sat down.

"Hey, Hinata."

"Hi."

"Did you like my present?"

"I loved it. Truly the intellectual, aren't you?"

He grinned, teeth white against his tan. "Just spreading the love around."

I poked a knife in TenTen's direction to get her attention, and caught a look from Rock Lee that said That's not safe! Mock-annoyed, I rolled my eyes in his direction. "Hey, TenTen. Is he always like this?"

"Who?" She swallowed her milk, her eyes bright. She looked like she'd gotten her full eight hours of sleep last night. "Neji-boy here or Rock Lee?"

"Both. You have a milk mustache."

Neji-boy wiped it off for her.

"Hey." She struggled. "I can do it myself, thank you."

The scene was cute but full of PDA-bleh. "Either one," I said.

"Oh." She thought for a moment. "Well, Neji's just being Neji, impossible like he is. Rock Lee, on the other hand, he's always got this etiquette complex, you know?" ("I'm not sure that's even a complex," Neji informed her, scratching his head.) "Like, he always wants everything perfect. He strives to be that, too - he's a perfectionist. And his manners are impeccable and everything. Just growing up to be another Gai sensei."

"But I thought Gai-sensei was...unconventional. Weird."

"He is not," said Rock Lee, two seats over, who had been listening like a bird outside a window. He winked noisily (I swear). "Gai-sensei may be strange on the outside, but he is a definite gentleman inside, a true _caballero_!"

"Refresh me on my Italian, Lee," Neji said, digging into his scrambled eggs.

"That is not Italian, that is Spanish. For 'gentleman'. Which Gai-sensei is."

"You had Spanish, Japanese, and English all in that one sentence," TenTen enlightened Rock Lee. "Nice multiculturalism."

"We're all a melting pot society," said Neji, and then he and TenTen launched into a discussion of whether America was better off ten years ago, with heavier immigrant flow, or now, with fewer people coming in. The discussion was scintillating, I'm sure, but I don't know for positive, I wasn't listening.

I was finished breakfast, that was a good excuse to get going. I headed for the paper with the schedules for campers and counselors, and located my name.

Hinata Hyuuga, it said. But the name beside it wasn't Sasuke, like he said he'd manipulate it for me. It was Sakura. At once something felt wrong – suspicious, somehow – but it could only have been that I wouldn't see him today. My schedule reported that in five minutes, I'd be on an animal-finding search at the marshes, which were at least a twenty-five minute walk away, so we wouldn't be back in time for dinner with everyone else. Likewise, I'd have to pack a lunch.

Maybe I ought to have felt relief, from not seeing him again and reliving the talk from yesterday, but I only felt melancholy. I wouldn't see him today, then. For anyone else it would be different, I wouldn't care, but I'd wanted to see him.

I was very aware of what I was doing in life; I was indecisive and uncertain. To put it simply, I was tumbling, and no one knew it better than I.

With a heavy heart I went back to the table to wait.

* * *

Love you forever if you review!


	19. Marshland Exploration

And on we go.

* * *

**Chapter 19  
Marshland Exploration**

Simple and clean  
is the way that you're making me feel tonight~  
-_Simple and Clean_, Utada Hikaru

So I boarded the bus, with a heavy heart.

Like so many things, combing animals in the marsh was a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

I discovered that casting off – temporarily – my worries, enjoying the moment, was better than being so preoccupied in my head. The kids, I loved. They were great; it was like they were magnets always pointing north, like sunflowers inclining their heavy heads to the sun: they were always happy, tripping over themselves, small misfortunes quickly forgotten. I envied them, envied how they knew how to let go of things so easily. Where did they learn it from? No; where did _I_ learned to hold onto things so tightly from, like my fist was made of stone? I'd effectively _un_learned how to be relaxed, gracious: growing up, I'd only learned to become petty and squabbling, always thinking about trite matters.

This was _not_ how my mother had taught me. So I set out to unlearn the walls and societal norms thick around me, if only for today.

Watching the little kids, I vowed to be liked them. There aren't a lot of times you want to _re_gress, but the times you do, they're so very important…

I learned how to spot signs of animal life – a footprint here, misplaced twigs here, a telltale burrow of some sort. Then – you had to wait patiently, to see if any animal would come out. This was my favorite part, the anticipation.

Most kids couldn't stand it. They tapped their feet, folded and unfolded their arms, pushed out their bottom lips. And they'd ask me: When? When are all the hidden animal gunna come out? And I'd shhh them gently say they'd be here soon.

Of course, that never happened. You can't force an animal to change its schedule. But a few times we got lucky; a mallard duck paddling by, with four precious babies behind her; a dragonfly that came alarmingly by close, so that we could see all its see-through turquoise wings, gauzy, like what a fancy woman would wear. It was the color of peacock feathers, that blue-green that that's not quite true blue or true green, right in the middle, iridescent but substantial. It seemed you could blow away the dragonfly with one puff, but they'd also been around for millions of years. A tapestry in itself.

You will want to know Sakura did not pay much attention to me, that she did her best to ignore me. I didn't care, looking stoically past her as she did not so much as let slip one word to me. The campers, she had plenty of things to say to.

As did I.

I crouched by the nets that two boys had dragged to the banks.

"What do we have here?" I untangled the marsh weeds that clung like fragile ropes. The nets were wide and shallow, designed for capturing more but smaller organisms. "You've got a…a spider-thing, I see," I said, leaning a bit backwards just in case the spider decided to jump out at me. "And a….some roly poly bugs. Is that a roly poly bug?"

"No, it's a hemiptera," said one boy, bespectacled, self-importantly. "See, Ernie? I told you we'd find a genus belostoma."

The red-haired boy, Ernie, punched the other boy in the arm, looking like he meant it but luckily not having enough power to actually inflict damage. "Shut up, Nerm," he said.

"Ernie," I started, "it's not nice to call other people – " I stopped. "Did you just call him _Nerm_? Is that your real name?"

The boy with glasses blushed blotchily. "Nermann, actually," he said.

"That's worse."

He stuck his lip out.

"Just kidding, that's better. But why did your mom name you that?"

"My dad was called that, too. And his dad before that."

"Oh," I said, thoughtfully. "That…stinks."

The other boy sniggered. The two were back to level ground. In a roundabout way I'd stopped Nerm from feeling better about capturing the roly poly…right?

The marshland expedition wasn't hard, just long. Hours after noon we were still kneeling by the banks, trying to capture more organisms for a complete collection. Many campers had already gotten bored and were playing board games – those magnetic travel editions – on a picnic table, but within sight.

By the looks of it, Sakura was getting bored, too. She didn't even smile when a camper had captured another one. Her hands, like mine, were muddy and cakey. The only campers who were excited, actually, were Nerm and two girls who cooed over the "darling bugs". If I'd been them that little and not been afraid of bugs, I'd be set. I marveled at their intrepidity, how they plucked up a roly poly bug and examined it close to their eyes.

But even they didn't protest when five o'clock hit and Sakura announced that it was time to leave. When we were back on the bus (it had come back at quarter to five), I collapsed in the front stea. I was surprised when Sakura took the seat across from me, exhaling with relief.

"Everyone set?" I asked the campers, scanning the back, where campers were squeezed three in a seat. To them the backseat was "cool". I had to stifle a grin.

"What a long day," commented Sakura dryly, when the bus had started rolling.

Was she speaking to me, like we were perfect acquaintances? I snuck a peek at her. She was facing front, not with her back to me. "Yes, it was," I said finally. "The kids, they're fun…but sometimes they're too much."

"Kids plus marsh equals a day of squatting and picking out gross bugs," she muttered.

I laughed, but I was mostly tense inside. Was that all? We were "okay" now? Did she forget about Sasuke? The ambiguity hung between us like a thick curtain, opaque and soundproof. I wanted to know more about her – friends seemed like too high a goal – and why she did the things she did, but it was more with relief that I looked out the window and did not attempt conversation again throughout the ride. We got back at camp in time for the last ten minutes of dinner. I felt a certain delight in being part of the "special ones."

"Oh, it's the marshland exploration, come back alive," the cafeteria lady welcomed us. I herded the campers through first. Sakura had gone to the bathroom (I did not blame her; my elbows were muddy, as was my face and neck. I forgot to be sanitary when my stomach was growling so wantonly). The cafeteria lady gave each of us an extra cookie, winking.

"Did you find any interesting things?" she wanted to know.

"We found some leeches, millipedes, and water walkers," summarized Nerm for her, rearranging his glasses professionally. "Also some earthworm larvae and tongue-eating louses."

"Forget I asked, dear."

"Honestly, Nerm," I said to him. "Sometimes it's better not knowing."

The marshland explorers were all at a table already, chatting and eating with their muddy arms and legs. Oops. I should have sent them to get cleaned…but never mind, because the line took me five minutes to get through, so only five minutes were left of dinner.

I plunked down my tray next to Karin, who immediately made room for me. She knew how to make people feel welcomed. "How was your marshland adventure?"

"Oh, it was beyond imagination," I said, launching into a description of the whole day. "…The nets were shallow; they could only caught bugs and stuff like that," I finished. "And I didn't even know half the things they caught. I should have paid attention in Biology."

"Nah, you're better off without that stuff," she said dismissingly.

"Nerm wouldn't think so," I countered, and pointed at him at the camper's table. "His only burning hot passion and lust is for identifying phylum, genies, and species."

"I wonder what he'll be like when he starts dating girls?" mused Karin. We dissolved into giggles.

"He'd be a stud," said Sasuke, leaning over and joining our conversation. Just like that. To Karin, he said, "Have you organized the campers into groups yet?"

"Not yet." She swung her straw in circles in her glass. "I'll get it to you by tomorrow."

"What is this for?" I asked.

"The Campfire Goodbye. It's the last event and it's next Wednesday," Sasuke explained.

"What do you mean, the last event?"

"Wednesday's the last day," he said simply. "The campers leave bright and early next Thursday morning."

"Thursday, my god…"

"I'd say you lost track of time," Karin observed, teasing me a little. "You've been here for a good two weeks."

"Two weeks…" I echoed.

"Times flies when you're having fun," quipped Sasuke. "You might want to stop gawping like that."

Chastened, I shut my mouth.

"She's surprised because of _you_, Sasuke," said Karin, lightening the atmosphere. "Don't tease her, it's your fault you're a lady-killer."

He brought his hands up like a person pleading innocent. "My bad, didn't know my looks could make a girl speechless."

"Bring the ambulance," I said. "I think I'm going to swoon."

"Better not be a female EMT," joked Karin. "She'd faint, too."

It was well after the time that dinner was supposed to be done by. I'd forgotten that usually, after dinners, counselors chatted and campers played some board games. It's the perfect ending to a Friday, I marveled. I wouldn't have to gobble up food in an unsightly manner.

"I still can't believe the camp ends next week," I said. "I don't want it o."

Sasuke slanted a look at me. Maybe he was inferring more meaning than face value from those words.

"Oh, well," said Karin. "It's always like this. It rushes by." She perched on the chair, hugging her knees to her chest. "The Campfire Goodbye adds a nice touch, though. Unlike the Extravaganza, there's no competition. Just a few fun activities."

"A fitting end," I agreed with her.

Despite this, I felt a stab of lonesomeness that haunted me throughout the night. I wondered what I'd do after the camp was over. Better not think about that yet, I advised myself. I'll climb over that hill when it comes.

* * *

I'm beginning to love this story more, despite its rambling twists and turns. I'm not sure when to end it, but to match it with the end of the camp is a good bet.

Don't worry about Hinata and Sasuke ;). They will figure things out soon enough.


	20. Avoidance

**Chapter 20  
Avoidance**

There she goes  
there she goes again  
racin' through my brain  
I just can't conta-ain  
this feeling that rema-a-ains  
~Sixpence None the Richer, _There She Goes_

I am happy to tell you I slept well that night. I didn't wake up, or have nightmares, or feel exhausted when I awoke.

The sun was gentle on my eyes – no perceived harsh glare, or muffled curses about the lack of curtains. I felt relaxed as I went to get breakfast. I had the feelings you get on those fine Sunday mornings, when you realize that people still have their faiths and go to mass loyally. It was the feeling that you will be fine because everyone else would be in high spirits.

I was inexplicably happy when I stood at the end of the cafeteria line and saw that Karin had saved me a seat. Our petty stoic silences and arguments had been left in the cycle of small accumulated daily events. Time could heal most everything.

When I got closer, though, I saw that Karin looked pensive, even preoccupied.

"Hey."

"Hey, Hinata."

"How are you?"

"Dandy," she said, not noting my expression. Words like that brought to mind cheerful bulging middleaged men in tweed coats and bowler hats.

"How'd you sleep?" I prodded.

"Mm-hmm fine," she said absentmindedly.

"Did you see the schedule yet?"

"Yes," she said, and didn't seem to realize that one-word replies weren't enough. She toyed with her breakfast sandwich. She put mustard on her eggs (I'm sure she thought it was ketchup).

"So where are you headed for today?" I asked. I was determined to push down exasperation. My mood trumped it.

"Mm hmm," she murmured.

"Full sentences would be nice," I supplied helpfully.

"What? I'm in swimming and diving today."

"What's with you? Are you all right?"

She blinked, directed her eyes on me. It was disconcerting, this sudden refocus, like watching a stranger for some time and having him turn around suddenly.

"Do you like Sasuke?" she asked.

"What?"

"You and Sasuke. Is there something between you guys?"

"What?" Now who could barely string together a response?

"You know." She seemed impatient. "You two. Chemistry?"

"Well yes…I mean no! I didn't mean to admit – I mean I didn't mean to say that!"

She ignored my stuttering. "That's a yes, then."

I could feel my good mood dissolving, replaced by unease. "Why are you so interested?"

She stopped and seemed to look at me, really look for emotions. "Hinata, I was interested in Sasuke for two years…"

"Oh…" It was only thing I could say.

"I didn't notice a single other boy in that time," she said.

"Oh." My spirits were plummeting.

She added, "And you are my friend."

"Oh. We…friends?"

"Friends," she said firmly. "One of my closest, in fact."

I couldn't be comforted yet. "But…"

"To answer your question why I am interested – like I said, I was obsessed with him for two years, and you're my close friend. That is why I'm interested."

"But you don't…"

"It depends on your answer," she said, albeit reluctantly. She saw the hurt flashing in my eyes. Abruptly she leaned over the table and gave me a quick hug. "I'm sorry, Hinata. I didn't mean to cause anxiety. It's cruel to wrest an answer from you. I already know it, anyhow."

"I guess it was obvious," I said, trying to get over my speechlessness, the whirling of emotions inside of me.

"You don't have to worry me and Sasuke," she assured me. "He and I are too much alike…like brother and sister, really." She sighed. "Besides, you and I are friends; I couldn't do that to you…"

"Thank you…" Warmth rushed in my heart.

"…but I can't deny that the only reason I signed up for this summer camp was to give the possibility of me and Sasuke one more go." She reached across the table, took one of my hands. "Look, Hinata. I have no intention of doing that now, like I said. That's a page of my history I wouldn't want to go back on. He rejected me quite hard, you know."

I nodded dumbly.

"So I want you guys to be together." It was taking her so much effort to say that, I could tell. Her eyes closed briefly behind her glasses, and when they open again, I saw her determination through her pain. "You two _should_ be together. I forgot how much he moped around after you'd left."

I shook my head.

"You know it. I don't have to try to get you to believe it. Hell, everybody around this camp believes it. You're the only one who's in denial."

My mouth started a storm of protest. "I'm not in denial – I've accepted there's no way on earth – "

"On _this_ earth there is a way," she said. "It's a ninety-nine percent chance of you two getting together. The other one percent is based on your stupidity."

I glared.

"Er, I mean denial."

"It's not possible," I repeated.

"Oh, but it is," she asserted. "And you might as well accept it. Theories that are ninety-nine percent accurate, you know, are largely held as scientific fact. Like evolution. There's doubt about it from some person, but everyone else accept it as a tenet of incontrovertible fact."

"You're trying to confuse the matter with a science analogy," I protested.

"It's an accurate analogy," she said, grinning. She hopped up, with both our plates in her hand, my breakfast largely uneaten. "But don't think I'm doing this just to be altruistic."

I had to wait until she got back from the trashcan to ask her about that comment.

"Oh come on," she said. "When Sasuke is impossibly happy after I've put you two together, I'll be in his good graces. Haven't you heard about his hot older brother?"

I stared at her blankly.

"He's the one I'm really after," she told me grinningly.

* * *

What good luck I had. After Karin had told me that she intended to play matchmaker, the schedule turned out to decree that the counselors for swimming and diving were Karin, Sasuke, Naruto, and I.

"It's not really that big of a coincidence , you know," Karin told me, as I waited at her cabin door while she packed her swimming suit. "I mean, I _am_ one of the counselors who takes care of scheduling."

"Hodgepodge."

"Do you want to borrow a swimsuit?" she asked me, her voice lovely and floating. She was obviously in an impeccably good mood. (I wondered what happened to me. Oh wait.) "It's not too old," she continued. "I got it in Ocean City, off the boardwalk."

"Recidivism." I was reciting SAT words I knew, because I was being deliberately annoying. It wasn't working on Karin, though, whose face was serene as she examined the yellow vintage-y bathing suit. It really didn't look half-bad, I had to admit, but I wasn't making any concessions.

"It's a one-piece, you know, so it'll match with your personality…"

"Deference," I said. How much _that_ was lacking right now.

"…because you're a prude."

I through my bag at her. It was one of those cheap canvas shoulder ones that didn't have a zipper or anything to keep its contents from spilling out. And out they did. A water bottle, a giant tube of sunscreen, another set of clothes in case my immediate clothes got wet, two beach towels.

"Honestly," she said critically, looking at it while I crouched down furiously punching them back in the bag, "your packing gear is practically _screaming_ 'I want bathing suit.'"

"They're not saying anything of the sort," I said.

"Oh goodie. You've stopped your irritable vocabulary reciting."

"'Irritating,'" I corrected her. "'Irritable' is to describe people. You're looking for 'irritating.'"

"Whatever," she dismissed. "Just don't go around reciting vocabulary in front of Sasuke. I don't think he looks for nerdy aspects in girls."

"No one _cares_," I said to her, but it was to her back because she'd gone to the mirror to freshen up her makeup. Me, I had brought none to the camp, and I wasn't regretting my decision. Well, all right, I sort of was, because you looked much better with blushy-er cheeks and redder lips and longer lashes and brighter-looking skin and…

But bringing no makeup was still a good decision! I stand my ground. My skin looked healthier and clearer on its own, without thick foundation dragging it down daily. I had so much acting makeup at home that it felt like a burden to not bring it. It was _annoying_ to check up on it every few hours. (Besides, I could always pinch my cheeks to fake a blush.)

I'd argued with myself for _days_ before coming here that wearing no makeup was better.

So I was stunned when Karin emerged from the bathroom, looking like a completely different person. She had _cheekbones_. Her glasses accentuated her charcoal eyes. The small mole on her chin was gone, and her eyebrows (twins-not-sisters) framed her face to make it look narrower, more lovely.

"You, dear, are going to have a makeover pronounced by me, matchmaker," she said, sweeping me in front of the mirror, plunking me down. All my arguments about not wearing makeup kerfluffled and kaputed, vocabulary be damned. For once in my life, I didn't argue one bit. Not a single iota.

* * *

The boys had gone to the swimming site already, bringing the boy campers. They were to set up all the chairs and paraphernalia at the lake. Karin and I were the second tier, bringing the girls. It was understood that we'd arrive half an hour later. We helped the girls in their swimming suits (so much more complicated than boys') and handed out camp swimming gear to each girl – two swimming flippers each, a beach ball for every two, and those long floaty pole things for every four girls.

The swimming site wasn't far away, a ten minutes walk from the camp. It was technically in camp territory, but away from the main sites like the lodge and cabins.

When we saw the sign to the site up ahead, Karin said, "Go on ahead with eight of the girls; I'll take the other eight so I can make sure they've all been accounted for."

"But – "

"You look great," Karin reassured me.

"It's not that," I said. But of course it was. Karin could pick my emotions apart in a second. I guess I'd underestimated my own vulnerability.

"All right," I said. To the girls I said, "Forward, ho!" and was rewarded with smiles missing teeth. I could do this; I could be brave.

After we pashed the sign and the shrubs and trees that blocked our sight, we embarked on a hill and, at the top, looked down to see the shining waters of the lake. No one had told me the swimming site was so big, and so gorgeous. I stopped there and didn't bother to run after the girls who ran ahead eagerly.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" said Karin, catching up to me.

"Yes, it really is." We stood there a moment, looking at the lake. The water rippled and threw lightning bolts to my eyes, it was so bright. I could see ducks along the deeper end of it. The weathered beige dock looked inviting. I could already imagine how the warm wood felt under my fingers.

I could see the boys, too, some jumping in the shallow end, others in a little deeper, with their swimming fins. I didn't see the distinctive black hair, but it was hard to tell, at this distance. The path to the lake stretched sider and then thinner, winding like a ribbon, disappearing every now and then through trees.

"Let's go," said Karin, her voice sparkling. "The girls are going to be red as lobsters if we don't put sunscreen on them."

"Let's," I said. I ran without a care in the world, breathing in the shining air, feeling like a kid again.

* * *

Naruto was speechless when he saw us

"Who are you two and what have you done with Karin and Hinata?" he demanded, following us to the chairs.

"It's called makeup, sonny boy," said Karin disparagingly. She grinned at him, canines flashing against her red, red lips. (I wore only clear gloss; red lips don't suit me.) "Where's Sasuke, anyway?"

"He's in the deep end, with a few campers. God! He takes four of them and I have to take care of, like, sixteen! It's unjust!"

"A cruel and unusual punishment," joked Karin. She took off her glasses and squinted. "I can't even see him. This lake is huge."

"He's such a douche," said Naruto. "I don't know why you're so interested in him."

"Oh, I'm not the one interested," said Karin, turning to look at him, one eyebrow raised. "Believe me."

I elbowed her.

"Well, I'm not," she said. "Naruto, who likes Sasuke! Go on and guess."

I squinched my eyes shut. When I opened them, I'd be somewhere else. Like, Omaha.

"That bastard," Naruto fumed, pacing in a circle and not appearing to hear Karin's question. "He grabs his swimming gear and like, sprints off. He didn't even to bother to tell me…"

It's true, what they tell you about guys having one-track minds.

* * *

An hour passed, and I was getting as red as a tomato, despite the sunscreen. "This stuff just doesn't _work_," I growled.

Karin, sitting next to me on the beach chair and reading a racy romance novel, said, "Too bad the camp doesn't have big umbrellas." She was sun tanning, of course, without any sunscreen. And her skin had skipped the lobster phase and directly when to the tanning phase. She was lucky.

"I don't understand," I complained. "They should test these things first."

"They do," said Karin, quirking an eyebrow. "On animals."

"You're not helping."

"Live a little, Hinata," she said, hiding a giggle. "The sun is shining, the campers are safe, the water feels great – you should try it."

"I'm wearing a T-shirt."

"Well, I brought my extra swimming suit, you know." She looked at my knowingly.

"I'm _not_ wearing it."

"What ya gotta hide?"

"Nothing!"

"Okay, okay," she said. "But really, I advise you to slip it on. At least underneath your T-shirt. Because lunch is in ten minutes and no doubt Naruto's going to swim to the deep side to call Sasuke over."

"Uh-huh."

"You know that, right?"

"Uh-_huh."_

"Gosh, you're stubborn," she said mock-dismissively.

She's one to talk.

* * *

"That's it," Karin said, when we saw the blonde and black heads in the distance. "They are coming. You have one to three minutes – depending on how much they waste time arguing – to change. You do not want to appear like a frightfully frumpish nanny in front of him, do you, now?"

"This is hardly frumpy material," I muttering, pinching my shirt to show her. "It's thin cotton, jeez. And I'm wearing shorts."

"T-shirts are the old-fashioned frumpiness to a modern, un-frumpy bathing suit," she declared. Whatever that means. Sometimes she is quite the actress herself.

"I don't care," I sulked.

"Look!" she said. "They're racing! I guess all that arguing turned into competition. I have to say, Hinata, you better hurry if you're thinking of changing."

"I'm _not_," I said, but her attention was diverted by their bodies, I guess. I have to admit I took a peek myself. Then I thought of Karin matchmaking me and Sasuke together, and I turned a redder color than the lobster sheen, and decided to hightail it out of there, avoid the situation as long as I could.

"I'm going to the bathroom," I said to Karin, who was engrossed and didn't hear me.

Only after I was a good fifteen feet away did she turn and whisper-hiss, "Hi-_na_-ta, what are you _do-_ing, they are _here_."

I opened the bathroom door, prayed that the inside of passably clean, and stuck my tongue out at Karin. "I am _taking_ a wee."

Sasuke and her matchmaking would just have to wait. I'd see how long I could be MIA.

* * *

I swear this is too fun to write.


	21. not easy for me

**Chapter 21  
not easy for me**

and I can't breathe without you  
but i have  
and i can't breathe without you  
but i have to

-_breathe, _taylor and colbie

* * *

"So I never found out who Isaac Asimov is, but you know, at least I'm working, and I have pay. You really don't remember the things you learn in school anyway."

– was what Karin was saying to Sasuke, as I creeped out the latrine (really dirty, by the way) and creeped by the tree. I listened, creeping.

"That's true," he agreed. "What with summer break coming to an end, I'm not looking forward to going back to college."

"You're majoring in Business and Economics, right?"

"Last time I checked. I might change, who knows."

"Eighty percent of college students change their majors once," said Karin wisely. "And of course, seventy-five percent change them twice."

"Hm." Silence. Then, "I can't imagine changing, though. My grandfather was a business entrepreneur, my father continued the business by being a finance manager and doing stocks. I'll have to inherit if they say anything about it."

"Must be tough," Karin said. "My mom doesn't care what I do. She didn't say a word when I veered off the acting road."

"I didn't know you stopped acting."

"I stopped it a year ago," she said nonchalantly. "It never gave me the meaningful work I wanted. I think Hinata stopped, too, but I'm not sure."

Apprehension crowding my temples, I decided to enter the conversation. I stepped away from the tree and walked in like being ten minutes late was perfectly natural.

"Here's Hinata," said Karin.

I grimaced. "Big entrance, right?"

She winked. "Sasuke and I were just talking about life after camp."

"Oh?" I saw her sly grin. "Care to enlighten me?"

She summed up the conversation, knowing full well I had been eavesdropping. "So that's that. It's too depressing; we're all finally growing up."

"I grew a long time ago," I muttered. It came out more jaded than I intended to.

Sasuke raised his eyebrows. "I'm sorry. Growing up is hard."

I didn't look at him. "It is."

"They say the real world is worth it. Do you agree?"

Was that a competition I detected? I'd just heard him not five minutes earlier say he didn't want to follow his father's footsteps. "I'm not sure," I deadpanned. "I think if it's full of kindergarten's virtues, like nap time and coloring, it's definitely worth it. If it's high-heeled shoes and deadlines, I'm not so keen."

"I think being grown up will be a challenge, but I'm up for it," he said. "How else will we become self-actualized? We can't sit around diddling with crayons and paper. We can't color in the lines forever."

Nice analogy, I thought snidely. He was being very…intense today. Or very mocking. I couldn't make heads nor tails of it. He stood, stretching a little. He had a long white towel draped over his shoulders, so he wasn't completely…visible. He was slow and sure, but still disconcerting.

"I disagree," I said stubbornly, trying to sound sure of myself. I didn't know why it was so important to show him my views. "Remembering your past is important. More important than shallow things like high school, which isn't the real world." I was not a great debater, a great anything. I finished and watched him, waiting for him to attack my measly defense. It was all I could do.

"I don't believe that high school and college under-prepares us for the real world," he said firmly. "I've worked long hours and met impossible deadlines in high school, haven't I? – just like any "adult". But I can see why you might feel under-prepared. You are changing your hobby, after all."

He might have been trying to be understanding, conciliatory, but all I knew was that at his words I felt ice at my spine and my shoulders shaking. There was something very frightening about cold sweat on a hot day. I knew he was playing a game, but I didn't what it was, exactly.

"Acting was never my hobby," I said quietly.

"Doesn't matter. You're under-prepared anyway."

I finally looked at him. Our gazes locked, mine furious, his uninhibited.

"I never said I want to go into the real word," he said quietly. "Or for you to go into it. But it's there, and I Was wondering how you'd take it."

He rose, scattering droplets of water that arced and caught the sun. I harbored the thought that the only reason they shone was because they had touched him.

* * *

Karin was silent when we had free time together after lunch. She only looked at me, examining my face.

"As you can see, we have no chemistry together," I stated without looking at her. I was rearranging the tablecloth. "In fact I don't think we ever did. I don't know what could have misled you – "

"Oh, don't be stupid, Hinata," she broke in. She dropped the used spoons and forks into the garbage bag. "It's called subtlety."

"I _know_ there wasn't yelling or whatever," I told her, feeling my fists clench," but even _I_ could tel he was pretty derisive towards me."

"Not derisive, Hinata. Think! God; why would he ask those questions?"

"He's a nosy-body! He wants to spread his views on everybody, though I do _not_ obviously believe in them. The real world – my God!"

"All right, maybe h has his views. But it doesn't mean he was forcing them on you."

"Karin, listen –"

"I'm sorry, but _you_ get your head out of the dirt and _you_ listen. I'm trying to get you to understand…"

"I don't need you to teach me, Karin. I can go ask Sasuke myself."

"No, listen – "

"I'm _not – _" I stood up and turned my back to her; " – listening." It was one of those instances my body acted before I thought it out. It walked away, and I wanted tot ell her, explain o her, that I'd been analyzing Sasuke's emotions, actions, words, for so long I simply did not wish to do it anymore. I did not want to read the subtext; I wanted things to be simpler. But I didn't tell her. Like a bad friend, I left her hanging.

* * *

I ran to him, I'm ashamed to admit. I was so caught up in the frenzy of deciphering his words that I just had to know what he meant. I was caught up in the cycle, like every preteen. Questions of _what did he mean, did he ask them because he likes me or hates me, does he hate me I can't bear it oh no oh no oh no – _

He was in the deeper waters, with Naruto and most the boys, and the flash of his image on my retinas was so searing, so incredible and bright and everything that I became someone else, someone reckless and intrepid and more beautiful than I was, and I leaped into the water and soared through the air like a bird, and landed and swam to him like a fish.

* * *

Beautiful Hinata, lovely Hinata, he'd say. He'd say this: I think those words were my imagination speaking, and I really don't care about the rest of the world. He'd say: I love you and want to take you far, far away where I can do delicious things to you and we will always be together because I love you and have always loved you from the moment I saw you and I know you love me too, I see the look in your eyes.

I pushed my way across the lake, my t-shirt and shorts clinging to me. The water was getting deeper. I had pushed my feet from the bottom now, and get a quick breath of air before going down and pushing myself back up. I did this because I was lazy, and could do this before the water got too deep. The boys were all the way across the lake in a shallow expanse of it, but they had walked around the parameter of the lake, thoughtful people they were. Me, I'd just taken the most direct approach, and now, with the lake becoming deeper than six feet, I was treading water.

No matter. I could doggy paddle. And do a complicated breast stroke if need be. The physical aspect of swimming for a few hundred feet didn't daunt me. I only wanted to brace myself for the mental aspect I needed when I arrived on the other side.

"Breathe," I said. My words were swallowed by the lapping of the waves against my body. It was cool, delicious. I'd stay here forever except I knew the longer I stayed in the more uncomfortable it would be when I got out. I'd be chattering and my feet and hands would be prunes.

Maybe I could make a bubble suit. I could live out here forever without being prune-y. Things would be perfect. Ah, but that's not the real world, said a snide voice. I said back to it, but that's the problem. There is no 'real' real world. And I ignored it and kept swimming, my frenzied dog paddling being replaced by a more slow, sure technique. He didn't even hear me when I put my hand on his warm, dry shoulder.

* * *

"I'll be back in one second," was what he had told Naruto, almost cheerfully evicting himself from his counselor position and having Naruto take command of the campers alone. But he'd lied. We had been sitting here for ten minutes now, much more than a mere second, and I was starting to wonder just how large Naruto's rage could grow.

"I really think you should go back now," I told him.

"You've been saying that ever since we cam here in the first place," he pointed out. "Any other round-breaking statement?"

"You've become more cynical," I said.

"Just jaded," he said. He picked up a few orange pine needles, flung them far. The wind swept them back and they landed on his collar, his neck.

I was cold. "We should really be getting back," I insisted.

He said to me, "I don't understand. I thought you wanted to talk to me."

"I did."

"Talking about the weather doesn't count," he said.

"All right, then. What about talking about the real world?"

"Oh, dear." He peered at me. Much too close; I skittered back. We were sitting in the forest overlooking the pond, but nobody from the pond could see us. I had forgotten that we'd sat under a tree with low hanging branches. My head made a dull thud and leaves flapped my face. I saw stars.

"The real world," I said, blushing scarlet, trying to be back on track, pretending that had never happened. "You know. What you just talked to me about and ended up leaving. You left me hanging. What – what do you mean? And why?"

"It's a stupid thing, the real world," he said with a flash of anger. "I wish I hadn't mentioned that."

"But you talk about it like it's a good thing. Life after camp. You know where you're going."

"do I, now? I was asking you questions earlier because I was curious. I want to know if you are doing something you love or you are doing something that is financially secure and so scheduled it will drive you crazy. Like what I will be doing. Accounting, my god."

"I don't understand," I said stupidly.

He looked at me, down, at the leaves clinging to my shirt, then my bare legs. "Are you going to pursue what you love?" he asked quietly.

"I – I hope so," I said. "I – I haven't really thought…thought about it."

"The kids," he said abruptly."At camp. Do you like working with them?"

The kids…I thought of Keito, Rue, all those adorable kids, even those who were not-so-adorable, and I thought, and I said, "Yes. I love camp." I don't know why, but I started to cry.

"Do you like it here? Do you never want to leave?"

No, no, his questions were throwing down my barriers. I thought of Karin, how much I liked her, how wise she was, of Kiba, TenTen, Neji, and him. I could not bring myself to speak, so I nodded. I wiped my eyes, my ugly, red face. I faced away from him and I only nodded.

"And me?" he asked. It was a whisper, and the wind was strong, but his words were the cleaest sounds I heard. I shook, and I nodded. The eyes I had just wiped dry started up again. Faucets, I thought. Fountains. Soon I was sobbing and his arms were around me and I couldn't remember the last time I had been held.

It's you, I wanted to shout at him, but I was incoherent, crying too hard. I didn't even know why. I never knew why. I wanted to tell him, I've always loved you. I wanted to wave banners, send him those stupid capitalistic Valentine's Day Cards, meaningless but meaningful just between the two of us. I was trying to remember the last time he had cared for me like this, and I remembered the hospital at Konoha, and I wondered why I had left.

"It's all right, it's all right," he was saying to me, but I wanted to push him away so I could see him and tell him everything about me, because I needed someone to listen. I wanted to tell him in coherent sentences that I loved the camp and I didn't want to leave it, leave him, and I didn't know what I would do when I was grown up but I would hate, absolutely hate, to be without him.

Somehow my emotions were conveyed enough, and I didn't need to tell him all that. I don't know how he knew. He has always known me.

"You don't have to worry," he said. "And I'm not feeding you some empty words! I'm telling you, you don't have to worry. I'll be here. I want to tell you, I want to tell you the years you were apart, I still thought of you…you're stupid for leaving, and I can't, I can't express…in words…"

He pulled away finally, but he didn't let me speak. He made a movement of his head, and his mouth was bitter-tasting and sweet, moving like velvet against mine, and I felt it, his understanding that this was not all easy for me, and alongside this, I heard the singing of all the feelings I had ever hoped to feel.

* * *

pretty prose.


	22. The End: The Beginning

**Chapter 22  
The End: The Beginning**

Oh, my heart is bursting again  
Don't leave this mark  
Your eyes are turning away  
_~A Silent Film, You Will Leave a Mark_

Not much changed after that, but everything did. Let me explain. I saw no more of him than I did for the other days, and everyone else perceived the relationship as the same it had always been, between me and him: awkward, full of meaningful silence. But it was not the same; it was not the same because though we spoke of many of the same things, I felt much closer to him, and he to I. We could have been discussing the philosophical view that is Nihilism, but it would be the peak of interest for both of us. We were comfortable around each other and that may be the bond that ties people who genuinely like each other together.

"So you see, Hyuuga. There is nothing more to discuss."

"There's plenty more."

"Don't laugh. I didn't have you come here to laugh at me."

"You realize that when the campers go, that that's the time when we'll finally discover our true selves?"

"Nice, Hyuuga. You are voicing the opinions I had told you a week ago."

"I just don't think that their going off is the worst of things. We can make something of it."

"It's too late to talk about it now. They're already gone."

"It's too early," I said, in a light tone. "Come; we still have a few hours of freedom before reality hits."

He sighed. He was standing over the highest part of the lake, and a few feet away from a spot where divers jumped. "We'll be going soon, too."

"A few hours, Sasuke."

He reached for my hand. "Let's go. Or better yet, let's just stay here."

* * *

The campers had gone. The shadows stretched long across the grounds, like a thin sheet of cotton that could snap, a spider web that had grown to immense proportions. I watched the second round of buses coming through, buses for the counselors to go on, their ugly blunt yellow heads blinking myopically, the yellow looking dusty and mediocre rather than cheerful. It seemed a cruel, capitalistic way of leaving the camp. Any other way would have been better than leaving the camp the way I had come. I had changed too much.

Karin stood next to me, elbows stuck out awkwardly. It was the only way to carry her bulky square suitcase, directly in front of her with her hands gripped tightly at the top so that the corners of the bag, sharp as they were, would not cut into her hip if she carried it by her side.

"It's surreal, isn't it?" she was saying sadly. "I expect Dali to paint something like this."

"Dali would have painted it. It's the stuff of nightmares."

"I don't want it to end," she said, on a note completely different.

I looked out serenely at the other counselors starting to board the buses, and understood her. "Where are you going, Karin?"

"Maybe back to my aunt. I don't want to think about it."

"I'll probably go back to Karu. And Hanabi. I don't want to…think about it, either. But I've had time to think it over and I should have gone back to see them a long time ago. Hanabi especially."

"Have you changed?"

"From the camp?"

"Yes."

"Yes," I said. "I think it's a shift of something internal. Certainly not physical."

"You're more sunburned, perhaps."

"Only that." I giggled.

"At least you have a sense of who you want to be."

"You do, too."

"Not according to my aunt, when I get back. I will go back, and she will ask me what the hell have I been doing at the camp, what the hell have I been doing for the last ten years. Then I will reply that I don't give a damn and never have, and I will slam my room, or even better, disappear for months at a time. I did that once. She didn't send a single person to search for me."

I gazed at her, quite astonished. "I think the solution's simple, Karin. Come live with us."

"With you and Sasuke? You two are about to be married?" she cracked a joke. Then she said, "Oh Hinata, can I really?"

"Yes," I said, decisively, feeling the cool weight of a decision slide down from beginning to end, like a knife cutting into margarine. I felt sated. "You will have to endure the nauseating spectacle that is TenTen and Neji, as they will no doubt be milling around the house with nothing to do, but it will have to do."

"Oh, I'll be ready for that," she said bracingly. "I just don't know if I can specifically endure your and Sasuke's hot flames of passion. Ow, ow!"

* * *

"I can only tell you I deserve it," I told Sasuke quietly in the backseat. Karu had picked all of us up – Neji, TenTen, Karin, Sasuke, and I – and we were pulling up in the driveway. "I haven't talked to Hanabi since she hung up."

"Slammed the phone down on you, you mean? I don't remember her very well, but I recall she's more volatile than you are. Which is saying something," he said, amused, watching my reaction.

"In a different way, yes, but she's also stronger."

"I find that hard to believe."

"Everything must be taken with a grain of salt, I suppose."

"You are a very strong person."

"I do what I can."

He exhaled. "See? You are not affected by compliments."

"They are the dregs of conversation," I said evenly.

"You need to lighten up," he observed. It was not a reprimand, so I did not feel defensive. It was only a statement that was all too true. "Here, let me carry that for you."

I stopped his arm before I thought about it. "Why were you holding hands with Sakura?"

He froze, his eyes uncharacteristically wide, like an innocent man's. I believed him before his words were out: "She wanted to know if we had a chance together."

I let my hand drop. I was suddenly unutterably exhausted. I knew his answer to her, had known it all along. But I only felt shame.

"You should have told her," I whispered. "You should have told her long ago."

"It's better late," he said simply, "than never."

* * *

I had been warned of Hanabi ever since I had gotten into the backseat of the car: Karu, with his impeccably honesty and a cigarette drooping from his fingers, had told me quietly and convincingly, "She's locked herself up in her room. She won't talk to you until you leave for college."

There in the backseat, with all my friends with me, like a nest, I had retorted, almost snidely, "I won't be going to college."

Karin and Sasuke had grown still. They were the young minds, to go ahead and finish their undergraduate studies, to become masters of their craft. I was the one who had taken the bombshell that was acting and let it rip apart my future.

"I don't know about college," I said to Karu, and the silence was like a statue, unmovable in its solidarity. "Maybe I'll take up some job. I like to work with kids."

Years ago Karu would have snorted at me, when I was at the height of my "career." "Children?" he would have said. "For you to become some teacher or petty nursemaid? _That's_ a good joke. Sometimes I think you ought to have taken up comedy instead."

But now his eyes, watching the road from the mirror, only mirrored my sadness. "If that's what you want," he said.

"It's what I've got."

The eyes closed briefly as he executed the turn into the familiar neighborhood. It was the smallest movement, but it was one of concession, acceptance, perhaps because we were both too weary of the past.

* * *

There had been brief intervals of light, but now there was only dark. I sat in the kitchen with the sunlight pouring in from the great by windows, among the people I loved, and felt not a sense of contentment, but of unfinished business, or worry for the future, or shame and guilt on the subject of my sister. It was true I had not spoken to her since she had slammed the phone down on me – and it was true, before that, that I had not even thought of her, after I had fled the house to take up – acting. In those years, to me, she had been some smudge in the recesses of my brain, something that bothered me only in the moments I went to sleep and the moments I got up, but a smudge that was undistinguished from the other smudges – the ones that made up the people of my past. They formed a little meeting around the table, and they were all eating the sandwiches from the local grocery, and they were all happy, smudges no more – they were seen in my eyes with the greatest clarity and peace. But my sister was still unidentifiable.

Karu had left a place of sandwiches up next to her room; "She still accept things like food, of course," he told me, after lunch, when we were upstairs and the plate was gone. "It's like she's a laboratory animal. She won't speak to me except for things like paper and books – she's thrown herself in her studies, you see; she's ranked in the top one percent of her junior class and she's taking quite the pains to achieve valedictorian – she's applying for governor's schools and internships over the summer – "

"Karu…"

"She's killing herself over you."

I let the words enter, marinate, in my brain.

"It's the last odd-and-end, Hinata. The last piece of the puzzle. The one thing that hasn't changed… what I mean is this. You left three years ago, and hurt many people you loved. Those people have forgive you now, except one of them: your sister. And I don't know if she ever will."

There were no tears for the occasion; just a somber processing of information. I nodded my head.

"I don't want to tell you it's too late, or that it's "never too late", but there are some things that cannot be changed. Your spirit, for example. You carried it through you even when you gave up acting. But there are other people, too, Hinata. And I'm not condemning you for what you did. But others' wills are just as strong."

"Try me," I said very softly, mutely, so that Karu, standing next to me, his arm around my shoulders, his hand smoothing my hair, did not hear. I said it to Hanabi, my sister behind the closed doors, and I knew that this would be the beginning of a long and wearisome battle. For me to win, both of us must win. For her to never accept me again, both of us would lose. I needed her as she needed me, and I knew that I had to make her understand.

I tore a piece of lined paper from my journal and wrote:

_If you're listening, I will talk._

I slipped it under her door and sat on my bed. I sat in the darkness and waited until morning. The sun rose, magnificent yet inconsequential as always, and I wondered how much we took for granted. I gave my whole body and mind for that sun, that morning, just to let it know I was grateful it rose each morning, performed its chore to head this band of petty, scurrying humans, caught up in their own troubles.

If only this trouble would be fixed. I opened my eyes and saw the long shadows that came from the sun's angle; I opened my door as my sister's door opened.

It was only a message, but it was a start.

* * *

I have finished; it is done.

It is a great Sunday morning that I look out my window today; it's a day of great finality yet of so little importance to all else. I'm glad I am done; I'll have to put more effort into one chapter of editing than I put into this entire story, because this whole story was done with very little effort. It's crap writing. But I am glad I am done.

-02/19/2011  
_Heavenlyhuntress._


End file.
